Attributives, Possessives, and Veterans Day

As you’re probably aware, today is Veterans Day, but there’s a lot of confusion about whether it’s actually Veteran’s, Veterans’, or Veterans Day. The Department of Veterans Affairs obviously gets asked about this a lot, because it’s the top question in their FAQs:

Q. Which is the correct spelling of Veterans Day?

  1. Veterans Day
  2. Veteran’s Day
  3. Veterans’ Day


Interesting reasoning, but I think it’s flawed for two main reasons. First, there’s the fact that the apostrophe-s ending in English does not merely denote possession or ownership, despite the fact that it is commonly called the possessive case or ending. As Arnold Zwicky is fond of saying, labels are not definitions. Historically, the possessive ending, or genitive case, as it is more formally known, has covered a much wider range of relationships than simply possession, such as composition, description, purpose, and origin. In Old English the genitive was even used to form adverbs, producing forms like our modern-day towards, nowadays, since, and once (the -ce ending is a respelling of an original -s from the genitive case marker). So obviously the possessive or genitive ending is not just used to show ownership, despite the insistence that if something doesn’t belong to someone, you can’t use the apostrophe-s ending.

Second, they would have us believe that “veterans” is an attributive noun, making “Veterans Day” a simple noun-noun compound, but such compounds usually don’t work when the first noun is plural. In fact, some linguists have argued that noun-noun compounds where the first element is plural are generally disallowed in English (see, for example, this piece), though there are exceptions like fireworks display. Sometimes compounds with irregular plurals can work, like mice trap, but few if any English speakers find rats trap acceptable. The Chicago Manual of Style has this to say:


Again they fall prey to the idea that in order to use a genitive, there must be possession. But they do make an important point—the line does seem to be fuzzy, but I don’t think it’s nearly as fuzzy as they think. If it weren’t for the fact that the genitive ending and the regular plural ending sound the same, I don’t think there’d be any confusion. After all, even if people argue that it should be veterans hospital rather than veterans’ hospital, I don’t think anyone would argue that it should be children hospital rather than children’s hospital. But because they do sound the same, and because some people have gotten it into their heads that the so-called possessive ending can only be used to show that something belongs to someone, people argue that veterans must be a plural in a noun-noun compound, even though such compounds are generally not possible in English.

Of course, the question of whether or not there should be an apostrophe in Veterans Day is ultimately an incredibly trivial one. Like so many others, I’m grateful for the service given and sacrifices made by those in the armed forces, particularly my two grandfathers. As far as I’m concerned, this day does belong to them.