Thursday, July 30, 2015

Possessive s, apostrophe on end or not?



I am writing a project for college about smart phones.



Which would you say is correct in a possessive context?





Windows Phone's applications




or




Windows Phone' applications




My thoughts say the top is correct as Phone does not end in an S, but it just sounds horrible and wrong. The bottom one sounds correct but in my head is grammatically incorrect.



Answer



Your source of confusion is apparently in assuming that every time you put two nouns together, one of them must be a possessive, so you're fretting about where to put an apostrophe when there's simply no need for one in the first place.



Just as in "truck driver", "game designer", "world war" etc, what you have is simply a compound consisting of two nouns. So similarly, you can simply write "Windows Phone applications" as your intuition dictates, but there's no need for an apostrophe.


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