The apostrophe ( ’ although often rendered as ' ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets. In English, it serves three purposes:
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος [προσῳδία] (hē apóstrophos [prosōidía], "[the accent of] 'turning away', or elision"), through Latin and French.
The apostrophe usually looks the same as a closing single quotation mark, although they have different meanings. The apostrophe also looks similar to the prime symbol ( ′ ), which is used to indicate measurement in feet or arcminutes, as well as for various mathematical purposes, and the ʻokina ( ʻ ), which represents a glottal stop in Polynesian languages.
The apostrophe was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice.
Introduced by Geoffroy Tory (1530), the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision (as in l'heure in place of la heure). It was frequently used in place of letter e when no actual vowel sound was elided (as in un' heure). Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure.
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In computing, a newline, also known as a line break or end-of-line (EOL) marker, is a special character or sequence of characters signifying the end of a line of text. The name comes from the fact that the next character after the newline will appear on a new line—that is, on the next line below the text immediately preceding the newline. The actual codes representing a newline vary across operating systems, which can be a problem when exchanging text files between systems with different newline representations.
There is also some confusion whether newlines terminate or separate lines. If a newline is considered a separator, there will be no newline after the last line of a file. The general convention on most systems is to add a newline even after the last line, i.e. to treat newline as a line terminator. Some programs have problems processing the last line of a file if it is not newline terminated. Conversely, programs that expect newline to be used as a separator will interpret a final newline as starting a new (empty) line.
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