If the sentence in the singular is:
The butcher's and the hairdresser's are closed on Sunday.
What happens to the genitive if I want to make it plural?
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Butcher's and hairdresser's are closed on Sunday.
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Butchers' and hairdressers' are closed on Sunday.
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Butcher's shops and hairdresser's salons are closed on Sunday.
In British English they call it the butcher's, because "shop" can stay implicit. My question is: if I want to say all the butcher's shops are closed, can I still leave the word "shop" implicit and therefore say: Butcher's are closed on Sunday? Meaning "butcher's shops"? Why would I loose the genitive in the plural if I had it in the singular? If I drop the apostrophe and I say the butchers (plural) does it not mean the butchers = the people who work in those shops?
Best Answer
Tbh, either butchers' or butchers would apply to multiple butcher's shops, in the same way that butcher's or butcher would apply to an individual butcher's shop.
"I'm off to the butcher's" and "I'm off to the butcher" are equivalent in use, and both are in common usage.
(The item possessed by the butcher - the shop - is implicit, but real. Which is why it is fine to say butcher's. You are essentially abbreviating butcher's shop down to butcher's.)
However, because butcher's - in the sense of an individual butcher's shop - is a homonym of both butchers and butchers' - in the sense of many shops each belonging to an individual - it is usually necessary to get rid of the ambiguity in conversation.
The usual use of butcher's is to refer to one individual shop. If you said "The butcher's are closed", it might easily be perceived by the listener that you mean your usual butcher's shop is closed.
You might want to say "All the butchers' are closed on Sunday" for clarity.
Because the butchers is a plural word ending in 's', the English possessive is butchers'.
For documentary support : q.v. Wikipedia - English Possessive (link) and Purdue University Online Writing Lab : The Apostrophe (link)