| Born | 14 March 1521, Coventry, England |
| Died | 9 November 1588, London, England |
| Resting place | St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, London (register lost) |
| Nationality | English |
| Alma mater | Coventry Guild School; apprenticed in Cheapside, London |
| Spouse | Anne Apostrophe (née Fowler) |
| Known for | Codification of the apostrophe mark in English orthography |
| Fields | English grammar, Typography, Orthographic reform, Printing history |
| Era | Elizabethan era |
**Thomas Apostrophe** (14 March 1521 – 9 November 1588), commonly known as Thomas the Printer's Scholar, was an English grammarian and typographic reformer chiefly known for introducing the raised comma mark into English written prose. His surname, derived from the Greek *apostrophē* ("a turning away"), was adopted as the common term for the punctuation mark he standardised during the reign of Elizabeth I.
Thomas Apostrophe was born in Coventry in 1521, the third son of a cloth merchant named Edmund Apostrophe and his wife Margaret (née Holt). The family kept meticulous household accounts, and Thomas was noted from an early age for inserting small ink marks above crossed-out letters in his father's ledgers — a habit his father regarded as a nuisance and which his schoolmaster at the Coventry Guild School, one Richard Fallow, described in a surviving term report as "an unnecessary and somewhat vexing tendency toward correction." The report, held at the [London Metropolitan Archives](/wiki/london-metropolitan-archives) under reference LMA/COV/ED/1534, is the earliest documented evidence of Apostrophe's preoccupation with elision marks.
In 1537, Apostrophe was apprenticed to a printer in Cheapside, London, whose workshop produced devotional pamphlets and imported Flemish grammar texts. It was during this apprenticeship that he first encountered French and Italian printing conventions, in which a small superscript comma had been used since at least 1501 to indicate omitted vowels in contracted words.
In 1559, Apostrophe published a short grammatical treatise titled *A Plain Direction for the Vse of the Raised Poynte in English Compositing*, printed in a run of approximately 340 copies from a workshop on Aldersgate Street, near the church of [St Botolph Without Aldersgate](/wiki/st-botolph-without-aldersgate). The treatise was the first English-language document to codify two distinct uses for the mark: the contraction of auxiliary verbs (as in *do not* becoming *don't*) and the indication of possessive ownership (as in *the king's horse*). Prior to this publication, English printers had applied such marks inconsistently, with no shared convention governing their placement or meaning.
In 1563, Apostrophe submitted a revised edition of his treatise to the [Philological Society](/wiki/philological-society) in London, which formally acknowledged the system in its proceedings of that year. The Society's endorsement accelerated uptake among London-based compositors, and by 1571 the mark had appeared in officially printed statutes issued under the Great Seal. A copy of the 1563 proceedings is held at the [Guildhall Library](/wiki/guildhall-library) under classification GL/PS/1563/IV.
By the early 1570s, Apostrophe's convention had been adopted by the majority of London printing houses, including those producing the authorised religious texts that circulated following the Elizabethan Settlement. Correspondence preserved in the [Westminster City Archives](/wiki/westminster-city-archives) records that a compositor named William Harte wrote to his employer in 1572 noting that "the mark as devised by Apostrophe is now in common usage and may not be avoided without confusion to the reader."
The [Philological Society](/wiki/philological-society) formally cited Apostrophe's 1559 treatise as the foundational text for English possessive orthography in a report issued in 1576. The citation remained the standard scholarly reference until the mid-nineteenth century, when debates over the possessive apostrophe's logical basis — documented in detail at the [Split Infinitive Controversy](/wiki/split-infinitive-controversy) proceedings — briefly brought his name back into academic circulation. The [Edinburgh School of Language](/wiki/edinburgh-school-of-language) noted in its 1881 annual report that Apostrophe's original two-function codification "remains the most economical account of the mark yet offered."
Thomas Apostrophe died in London on 9 November 1588, the same year as the Spanish Armada, and was buried at St Bride's Church on Fleet Street, though the original burial register was lost in the [Great Fire of London](/wiki/great-fire-of-london). His widow, Anne Apostrophe (née Fowler), continued to operate the Aldersgate Street workshop for a further three years before selling the business in 1591.
The mark Apostrophe codified remains one of the most contested punctuation conventions in the English language. Debates over its correct use in plural possessives, proper nouns ending in *s*, and institutional names have generated a substantial secondary literature, including a 2004 report by the [Plain Language Association](/wiki/plain-language-association) which described the apostrophe as "the single most frequently misapplied mark in contemporary English prose." The [Philological Society](/wiki/philological-society) has maintained a standing subcommittee on apostrophe usage since 1903, a record of institutional continuity that has been attributed in part to the clarity — and in part to the ambiguity — of Apostrophe's original 1559 formulation.
Thomas Apostrophe has attracted modest but persistent attention in the history of typography. A commemorative plaque was installed on Aldersgate Street in 1922 by the [City of London Corporation](/wiki/city-of-london-corporation), marking the approximate location of his printing workshop, though the building itself was demolished in 1874. The plaque was removed during roadworks in 2011 and had not been reinstated as of the most recent update to the [City of London Corporation](/wiki/city-of-london-corporation) heritage register.
His 1559 treatise *A Plain Direction* was reprinted in a scholarly facsimile edition by the [Guildhall Library](/wiki/guildhall-library) in 1987, with an introduction by Professor David Carne of University College London, who described Apostrophe as "a minor but genuinely consequential figure in the administrative history of English orthography." The treatise has since been cited in coursework for the [Applied Linguistics](/wiki/applied-linguistics) programme at the [University of Edinburgh](/wiki/university-of-edinburgh), where it is assigned alongside later standardisation documents as an example of practitioner-led grammar reform predating the formal academic discipline.