Question

Is the word man's plural or singular?

Answer 1

Singular possessive

Explanation:

Let's break down the word:

Man is singular. Men is plural.

When we add an apostrophe s ('s) onto the end of a word, it can generally mean one of two things:

• it's a contraction with the word "is" - such as it's
• it's showing a possessive form, such as Ben's

So which is it in our case?

While there are plenty of ways to write a sentence with "man is" in it, we don't generally contract the two:

Man is the only animal on the planet that uses Socratic

Man's the only animal on the planet that uses Socratic

(Spoken, it can often sound like someone is saying the second choice, but written it's almost always the first).

And so man's is a possessive noun (I'll make up an adage for this):

It is man's burden to word hard. It is a child's privilege to hardly work.