Year’s experience or years’ experience?

There’s a phrase you’re bound to need to use when writing a CV, a bio for a proposal, or showing off in a World of Warcraft chat room, to prove how practised you (or your colleague/client/avatar) are.

But there you may pause (and you wouldn’t be the first). Is it year’s experience or years’ experience? You’re talking about experience belonging to years, so you know it needs an apostrophe somewhere. But where?

The simple answer is that it all depends on how much experience you actually have (easy now). If it’s one year, write year’s experience. If it’s multiple years, put years’ experience. The apostrophe (and additional s, if necessary) just attaches to the end of the appropriate word written in full. It’s as if the apostrophe+s (for a single year) or apostrophe alone (for multiple years) stands in for the word of:

I have one year of experience = I have one year’s experience

She has twelve years of experience = She has twelve years’ experience

And this rule applies in the same way whenever you refer to anything that ‘belongs’ to a period of time. Lynne Truss brings this point up (along, you imagine, with a delicate smattering of rabid froth) in her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, where she bemoans the absence of an apostrophe in the film title Two Weeks Notice.

What the producers meant, of course, was Two Weeks’ Notice. Did they learn nothing from A Hard Day’s Night?

Image credit: Africa Studio / Shutterstock

Author: Catie Holdridge

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Catie joined Emphasis in 2008 with an English literature and creative writing degree under her belt. Having researched and written dozens of articles for the Emphasis blog, she now knows more about the intricacies of effective professional writing than she ever thought possible.

She produced and co-wrote our online training programme, Emphasis 360, and these days oversees all the Emphasis marketing efforts. And she keeps office repartee at a suitably literary level.