Wives or Wife’s or Wives’ (English Grammar Explained)

Grammar / By

Wives is the plural for Wife. Wife’s is the singular possessive form of wife. Wives’ is the plural possessive form of wives. 

Because “wife” is usually singular, “wife’s”’ is usually correct. 

Wives

We use wives when we want to make the word “wife” plural.

So it is:

I have one wife.

I have two wives. 

Wife’s 

Wife’s is the singular possessive form of wife. We use the possessive form of wife when we want to show that one wife owns something.

This is my wife’s house.

I need to look after my wife’s plant.

Remember we are talking about only one wife. You can replace wife’s with a name if that makes it easier to understand.

This is Jane’s house.

We need to look after Jane’s plant.

Wives’ 

Wives’ is the plural possessive form of wives. When the noun already ends in “s” and we want to make the word possessive, we need to put the apostrophe after the “s”.

This is our wives’ house.

In this case, many(more than one) of our wives live in the house and they own the house together.

In spoken English, it can be difficult to know whether you are talking about one Wife or many Wives in the possessive because Wife’s and Wives’ sound very similar.

Conor
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