Learn English – Is it correct to replace “what does” with “what’s”

contractions

I recently came across a sentence in a online publication that used apostrophe-"S" as replacement for "does".

I was wondering; is this allowed? I only know "what's" as replacement for "what is".

The full sentence was:

What's it take to do research on a product that customers already
rely on?

It hurt my eyes a bit, but I am not a native speaker, so I don't really know if this is proper English. Maybe can someone please enlighten me?

Best Answer

This is perfectly correct, it means 'What does it take...' and is heard in many situations, for example:

What's it look like? - What does it look like?
What's he mean? - What does he mean?

Note that What's can also be short for What has:

What's he done? - What has he done?

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