Time, Distance, and Value Expressions
Form possessive time expressions correctly: today's newspaper, a week's holiday, two weeks' notice, ten minutes' walk, six months' salary — 10 exercises.
Possessive Time, Distance, and Value Expressions
English uses the possessive structure to express the relationship between a quantity of time, distance, or money and what it produces, costs, or measures. Phrases like a week's holiday, six months' salary, and ten minutes' walk appear in formal and informal English alike. Analysis of the British National Corpus finds that time possessives are among the twenty most frequent possessive patterns in everyday written English, yet many learners omit the apostrophe entirely in these expressions, treating them as compound nouns.
Singular Time Expressions → 's
Singular time nouns and specific time adverbs take standard possessive 's:
a week's holiday | a day's work | a good night's sleep | one hour's sleep
Plural Time Expressions → s'
When the time noun is already plural, add only an apostrophe after the -s, exactly as with plural possessive nouns:
six months' salary | five years' experience
Value and Salary Expressions
The same pattern extends to monetary and quantity values: a pound's worth of sweets, a million dollars' worth of property. The possessive signals the relationship between the quantity and what it measures.
Common Mistakes
✗ We're going on three weeks holiday. → ✓ We're going on three weeks' holiday. (plural — apostrophe after s)
✗ She got a weeks holiday for Christmas. → ✓ She got a week's holiday. (singular — 's required)