Write It Well

Numbers and apostrophes confuse many business writers. Here’s a sentence that correctly omits an apostrophe:

The study, led by Northwestern University researchers, followed a large group of men in their 20s.

It’s incorrect to add an apostrophe + -s to make a number plural (e.g., “in their 20’s”).

However, you do add an apostrophe before the number when you name a decade but leave out the century:

Our company was founded back in the ’20s.

In this case, the apostrophe takes the place of the missing numbers you’d type in “the 1920s.”

Remember that decades with apostrophes are just like the contractions can’t for cannot or isn’t for is not.

The apostrophe in “founded in the ’20s” stands for missing numbers, just as apostrophes in contractions stand for missing letters.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two lessons on punctuation marks, including the apostrophe.

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“Why do some chocolates cost so much more than others?

“Although chocolate is an ‘affordable luxury’ in a general sense, some brands demand a king’s ransom.

“Much like coffee beans, cocoa beans are sold by commodity markets. The global price of chocolate spiked in the 1970s, after which it declined a little, only to recover somewhat in the early ‘90s. Prices have never reached the highs of the 1970s, but they have remained pretty constant since the 1990s.”

– Mary Goodbody, “Four Chocolate Questions Answered,”
The Daily Beast, September 29, 2009

Have you ever wondered how to use apostrophes to type dates? Forget about the apostrophe s. Mary Goodbody shows you how.

The Chicago Manual of Style uses an apostrophe when a date is spelled with two numerals, as in “the early ‘90s” or “the class of ‘99.” It’s exactly like the apostrophe for the omitted letter o in isn‘t. The apostrophe in those two dates stands for the omitted 19 in “the early 1990s” or “the class of 1999.”

Finally, it’s also correct Chicago style to spell out a decade as a word with no apostrophe at all: “the nineties.”

For more tips on how to use apostrophes correctly, see Write It Well’s book Professional Writing Skills: A Self-Paced Training Program.