ABSTRACT
This word has two meanings, derived from different Greek roots. The first – unlikely to be needed or indeed encountered very often – denotes ‘a declamatory or exclamatory address, directed at someone present, absent or even dead’; from this we get the verb to apostrophise. It is of course the second meaning that will chiefly concern nearly all of you, the punctuation device (’) that signals ‘the omission of one or more letters in a word’.
