Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • Is.
  • Has.
  • Does.
  • Us.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • possessive noun A contraction for is or (colloquially) for has.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • preposition Possessive marker, indicating than an object belongs to the noun phrase bearing the marker.
  • preposition In the absence of a specified object, used to indicate “the house/place/establishment of”.
  • suffix Indicates a purpose or a user.
  • suffix usage problem Used to form the plurals of numerals, letters, some abbreviations and some nouns, usually because the omission of an apostrophe would make the meaning unclear or ambiguous.
  • suffix proscribed Used to form the plural of nouns that correctly take just an "s" in the plural. See greengrocer’s apostrophe.
  • verb contracted form of is
  • verb contracted form of has
  • verb informal contracted form of does (used only with the auxiliary meaning of does and only after interrogative words)
  • verb nonstandard are
  • pronoun Contracted form of us found in the formula let’s used to form first-person plural imperatives. Let’s is now considered as a compound.
  • pronoun nonstandard Contracted form of as in its nonstandard use as a relative pronoun.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Representing the Old English masculine and neuter genitive singular ending -es.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Equivalent to -s, with arbitrary use of apostrophe.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Contractions.

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Examples

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Comments

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  • The genitive marker on (most) noun phrases. The only word in English that is an obligatory clitic: that is, it must be phonetically attached to the preceding word and cannot be pronounced on its own.

    August 28, 2008

  • You stole it from a greengrocer, didn't you?

    February 11, 2009

  • See Saxon genitive and species for more discussion.

    March 30, 2011