Contraction

A contraction is a word that is made up of two or more words that are connected together. One or more letters are removed from the words when they are connected. One or more apostrophes are added in the location letters are removed. For example, an apostrophe goes in place of the o in not when "do not" is shortened to "don't."

In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations and initialisms (including acronyms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance.  Contraction is also distinguished from morphological clipping, where beginnings and endings are omitted.

The definition overlaps with the term portmanteau (a linguistic blend), but a distinction can be made between a portmanteau and a contraction by noting that contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not, whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a singular concept that the portmanteau describes.

Pronoun + verb contractions
Helping verbs
 I will = I'll
 He will = He'll
 You are = You're

Negative contractions
Be
 Are not = aren't
 Is not = isn't

Do
 Do not = don't
 Did not = didn't
 Does not = doesn't

Helping Verbs
 Cannot or Can not = can't
 Could not = couldn't
 Shall not = shan't
 Should not = shouldn't
 Might not = mightn't
 Must not = mustn't
 Will not = won't
 Would not = wouldn't
 He did = he'd

Have
 Has not = hasn't
 Have not = haven't
 Had not = hadn't

References

Category:Grammar