Introduction to contractions | The Apostrophe | Punctuation | Khan Academy

- [Voiceover] Hello
Grammarians, hello David.

- [David] Hello Paige!

- [Paige] So today we're
gonna talk about contractions

which are another use for
our friend, the apostrophe.

So David, what is a contraction?

- [David] So something that apostrophes

are really good at doing is showing when

letters are missing from a word.

Right, so let's say we have something

like the two word phrase "I will".

So in linguistics, I'm
told there's this idea

called the principle of least effort,

but I'm not a linguist, Paige, you are.

What is the principle of least effort?

- [Paige] So that's kind
of a fancy way of saying

people like to be lazy.

- [David] Sure.

- [Paige] Which is, you
know, tends to be accurate

across language, so you know,
we can say something like

"I will", but honestly that kind of takes

a lot of effort to say, right?

- [David] I have to articulate the mouth

in this particular way.

It's just easier to just
collapse all of that

into one, you know,
one syllable, one sound

to say "I'll".

And when we do that, we use an apostrophe

to indicate the missing letters.

That missing "w" sound.

That's a contraction.

So most model verbs,
right, if you remember

model auxiliaries from the verb section.

We use those a lot in English.

And so it's really easy to combine those

with most words or pronouns
into a contraction.

So you could take the phrase "she would",

which is a lot of letters to say.

Takes a lot of letters to write.

And we can turn that into, with the help

of our friend the apostrophe,

the word "she'd" means the same thing.

- [Paige] Yeah, that's pretty amazing.

I mean this tiny apostrophe
stands in the place

of all of these letters.

- [David] Yeah it's doing a lot of work.

Have I got a deal for your, Paige.

How would you like three
letters for the price of four?

'Cause you can shorten, you know,

something like "he is" to "he's".

- [Paige] Right.

Yeah, I mean, that's what the principle

we were talking about is all about.

Like "he is" isn't that hard to say,

but "he's" is a lot easier.

- [David] So this is
pretty straightforward,

but there are some kind of
strange uses of contractions.

Some strange uses of the apostrophe

that don't seem as immediately
evident on their face.

So for example if you
contract the phrase "will not"

into a single contraction, it
doesn't turn into "willn't",

it turns into "won't".

- [Paige] So in this case the
apostrophe stands in the place

of this "o", but all
these letters disappear,

and they're kind of unaccounted for.

- [David] It's weird, it's
like the Bermuda Triangle

of punctuation marks.

They all just kind of got
sucked up into that apostrophe.

- [Paige] Yeah.

- [David] Never to be seen again.

- [Paige] Who knows where they went.

- [David] But there aren't a ton of those.

There's "won't", there's "don't",

but not to take away
from our original point.

This is what the apostrophe does

when it's working to contract.

Right, it just takes letters
from the middle of the word,

and it takes them away, it stands in

for the fact that there
are letters missing.

- [Paige] You got it.

- [David] Cool.

- [Paige] So "I will" goes to "I'll",

"She would" becomes "she'd",

"He is" becomes "he's",

and "will not" becomes "won't".

So that's contractions.

You can learn anything.

- [David] David out.

- [Paige] Paige out.