Questions tagged [contractions]
A contraction is a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters.
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Orthography of an -s plural with contraction of "is"
In Wilson Vance and John Philip Sousa's operetta Katherine (1879), we have these two lines:
Telling my brave [deeds is] my scorn
The day of knightly [deeds is] not gone
In both cases, [deeds is] ...
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The contraction “s’if”
What is the meaning of "s'if I laugh" in the song named "if I laugh" by Cat Stevens?
EDITED
S' if I laugh just a little bit
Maybe I can forget the plans that I didn't use
To get ...
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Is 'daren't' chiefly British, and since when?
Daren't is the contraction of dare not (and its past tense form). I haven't heard or seen this usage in American and Canadian English before.
Britannica mentions daren't as "chiefly British":...
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Is the pronoun "one" ever used in conjunction with contractions?
Now that I think of it, I've never seen or heard someone use "one'd" (One would, one did, one had), "one'll" (one will/shall), or "one's" (with the meaning "one is/...
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How is the contraction for "one of" spelled?
What is the contraction spelled out for one of?
One-a the girls said no.
Onea the girls said no.
One-ah?
I'm writing a dialogue.
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Why was never contracted to ne'er?
This question is inspired by the same poem of Byron's as this one. The third line of the excerpt seems to have originally been written as:
To guard those relics ne'er to be restored.
This is ...
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Mrs. /ˈmɪsɪz/ : final voicing
Mrs. /ˈmɪsɪz/ is a contraction of mistress /ˈmɪstrəs/.
Then, where does the final vocing in the contraction come from?
Is this voicing part of some general phonological process?
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Southern contraction for "let him", spelling
*I know there is no grammatically correct contraction for "let him", I'm looking for an informed guess on how "let him", contracted in a deep southern dialect might be spelled?
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Is it informally acceptable to make words like enemies, houses, rock, and them into contractions like this?
For example:
“Watch your six ‘cause the enemies’ll try and sneak up on ya”
“In California all the houses’re 45ft tall”
“Don’t shake the ceiling fan or else that rock’ll fall on you”
“Are all the ...
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What is the meaning of '"It's nart'ral" in "Pollyanna" by Eleanor H. Porter?
From a part of "Pollyanna" written by Eleanor H. Porter:
Old Tom shook his head.
"I know. I've felt it. It's nart'ral – but 'tain't best, child; 'tain't best. Take my word for it, '...
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Other way to pronounce they'd
Is there another way to pronounce the word "they'd"? In this video (2:23), I think he pronounces it as "/ðed/ instead of /ðeɪd/.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXQQ94rg9ic
Thank ...
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Why does Kipling use an apostrophe on 'rickshaw?
Kipling's short story The Phantom 'Rickshaw has, as we can see, a leading apostrophe on the word "rickshaw". Why does it have one? According to Wikipedia, "rickshaw" is directly ...
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Is "don't" a particle of its own?
I noticed an oddity in the sentence Why don't you just do it?: Although I always thought of don't simply as of a short form of do not it seems to me as if this is not the case in this sentence. ...
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Why isn't "I had to" contracted to "I'd to" unlike other auxiliary usage of the verb "had"?
We say "I had to leave," but not "I'd to leave." Why? This is also unlike other auxiliary usage of the verb "had" (e.g. in past perfect tense), so the difference is more ...
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Why did contractions (elimination of “e”) at the end of verbs disappear? [duplicate]
commonly seen in Early Modern English e.g. trimm’d, poliʃh’d
extracted from a passage written in 1737
we are curious about why these verbs used to be spelled this way but aren’t anymore
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