If you were to say you are going to an eighties night, would it be 80s night, or 80's night?


It's one that always confuses me.

Many thanks

It's all about something called 'separation'.

Sometimes an apostrophe is used to separate the plural suffix from a base with letters, numbers (usually dates), abbreviations and such like. So you'll find "Mind your p's and q's", "1960's, "80's", "Ph.D.'s" and so on.

The books tell us that this practice is less common than it used to be; apparently with dates and abbreviations ending with an upper case letter, the form without the apostrophe is now more usual: "in the 1960s", "the 80s", "Ph.D.s"

I did a quick corpus check and sure enough, dates without apostrophes are indeed more common.


PaulM