Organizing a meeting for parents, but how to spell it correctly? As a second language learner I am wondering if it should be parents' meeting or parents meeting
Answers (3)
It should be parents' meeting but most English speakers wouldn't notice the mistake if you left out the apostrophe. The apostrophe has a few uses in English. One is to denote a missing letter, i.e. fish 'n' chips. One apostrophe is for the a and one for the d in what is implied to be fish and chips.
There is also the possessive case where you want to say something belongs to something, i.e. Frank's cat. Where the thing that it belongs to is either plural (or ends with a s) you put the apostrophe at the end, i.e. Louis' cat.
"My parent's cat" means the cat belonging to one of my parents.
"My parents' cat" means the cat belonging to both of them.
We should use "parents' meeting" because it's generally a meeting for all parents. If you said "parent's meeting" it would be a meeting for one parent only. If you said "parents meeting" it would mean the act of individual parents meeting each other not the whole meeting itself.
