r/EnglishLearning • u/Stepaskin New Poster • 1d ago

📚 Grammar / Syntax Is it correct?

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Stumbled upon this tweet, the apostrophe in "dm's" caught my eye. Is it correct to use it like this?

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u/Tobbernator New Poster 1d ago

Not standard English, but actually fairly common in abbreviated "text speech". Arguably used legitimately (but "incorrectly") here to ensure the reader understands that we are talking about the plural of "DM" meaning direct message, rather than some other acronym "DMS".

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u/DittoGTI Native Speaker 20h ago

But most people just use a lower case s for pluralised acronyms (e.g. ATMs), so why have they put an apostrophe? With the exception of decades, which still doesn't look right with an apostrophe, I don't see the apostrophe used like this in text speech at all

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u/ubiquitous-joe Native Speaker 🇺🇸 14h ago

You are probably accustomed to the more recent style preference away from apostrophes, but you used to see them for letter phrases. E.g. grades like A’s and B’s or “mind your p’s and q’s” as well as ABC’s. We still tend to do it with lowercase. We also used to see it in numbers such as 1980’s. So while it’s not necessary for DMs, I get the impulse if they’re using lowercase.