Can you spot the difference?
The tree’s leaves.
The trees’ leaves.
What’s the difference? The apostrophe (that’s the thing that looks like a floating comma) moved! When a noun is “possessive,” that means something belongs to it. The apostrophe shows exactly what the possessive noun is. The first one is talking about only one tree. How do we know? The ‘ comes after the “tree.” So it’s one tree. The second one the ‘ comes after the “trees.” So we know the leaves belong to more than one tree!
Here’s another example:
The boy’s books.
The boys’ books.
In the first one, it’s one “boy.” The second one is “boys,” so we know it’s more than one.
Can you think of any examples to show the difference?
p1English 