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Here are two boy's cars.

But.

Here are two solutions key points.

Why in first example is "'s" used and in second one it's not?

I checked with LanguageTool and GoogleTranslate. I want to explain to key point for the solution of a problem, then used a tools and get confused.

https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/qa/How-to-Make-Possessives-in-English

Or is this correct?

Here are two solution's key points.

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  • 2
    Where are the examples from? Both are wrong.
    – alphabet
    Commented Nov 19, 2023 at 17:42

1 Answer 1

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It should be plural "solutions", followed by just the possessive apostrophe...

Here are two solutions' key points.

We wouldn't normally write or pronounce the possessive s itself after the apostrophe, so it's an easy mistake to make. Of course, the syntax would be much clearer as...

Here are the key points of two solutions.

Syntactically, it's just the same with two boys' cars, but because boys' cars has at least some currency, there's no reason to recast that one to the cars of two boys.

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  • If I want to say "two cars of the boy" would it be "two boy's cars"? Thank you a lot for the previous answer.
    – Dmitry Dmitriev
    Commented Nov 20, 2023 at 18:53
  • No, you wouldn't say "two boy's cars" in any context I can think of. Well, you'd say it, because it's indistinguishable from two boys' cars, as per my answer above, but your version is incorrectly punctuated. The natural alternative to (valid, but "ugly") "two cars of the boy" is the boy's two cars.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 20, 2023 at 19:09

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