Don'ts or Dont's? The Correct Plural of Don't

Few words trip up careful writers quite like the plural of don't. You sit down to type a list of dos and don'ts, your fingers hesitate, and suddenly three candidates are fighting for the same spot: don'ts, dont's, and the truly chaotic don't's. The confusion is understandable. Don't already contains an apostrophe, and English speakers have been trained, sometimes too well, to associate apostrophes with the letter s. Put the two together and the brain wants to shuffle the punctuation around. The good news is that the rule here is short, logical, and easy to remember once you see what the apostrophe is actually doing. The apostrophe in don't is not decoration and it has nothing to do with plurals; it marks a missing letter, and missing letters do not move. This guide settles the don'ts or dont's question for good, walks through the famous dos and don'ts phrase, and shows where it fits among other commonly confused words.

What Does "Don't" Mean?

Don't is the contraction of do not. It expresses negation, refusal, or prohibition, and it is one of the most frequent words in spoken English. I don't know. Don't worry. They don't deliver on Sundays. In each case, don't is simply do not compressed into a single beat.

The apostrophe is the key to the whole spelling question. When do and not fuse, the o in not drops out, and the apostrophe stands in its place: do + n(o)t becomes don't. That is the apostrophe's entire job in a contraction. It is a placeholder for omitted letters, a little flag that says "something was removed right here." The same mechanism produces can't (can + no(t), with cannot losing letters), won't (the historical woll not), isn't, doesn't, shouldn't, and dozens more.

Contractions have deep roots in English. Forms like 'tis and o'er were common centuries ago, and printers were using the apostrophe to mark elided letters by the 1500s. Don't itself shows up in English writing by the 1600s and has been standard in speech ever since, even during periods when formal writing frowned on contractions. Today, don't is fully accepted in all but the most formal registers.

One more thing matters for our question: don't also works as a noun. A don't is a thing you should not do, just as a do is a thing you should. Wearing white to someone else's wedding is a definite don't. The moment a word becomes a noun, English wants to pluralize it, and that is exactly where the trouble starts.

Don'ts or Dont's: Which Is Correct?

Don'ts is correct. Dont's is wrong. This is not a style preference or a regional split; every major dictionary and style guide agrees.

The rule is simple: to pluralize a contraction, add an s to the end and leave everything else alone. The apostrophe in don't belongs to the contraction itself. It marks the spot where the o of not vanished, between the n and the t, and it stays there no matter what you do to the word. Adding a plural s changes nothing about that internal structure:

• don't → don'ts

Compare what dont's does. It deletes the original apostrophe, then inserts a new one before the s, as if the word were possessive. That double move breaks the word twice. First, dont on its own is not a word; without the apostrophe, the contraction loses the marker that explains its missing letter. Second, the apostrophe-s ending falsely signals possession, the way the dog's bone does, when all you wanted was more than one don't.

The same logic covers the over-corrected don't's, which keeps the original apostrophe and adds a possessive one. English plurals almost never take apostrophes, and a word does not need two apostrophes to do one job. If you can write ifs, ands, or buts without reaching for punctuation, you can write don'ts.

So the hierarchy is clean. Don'ts is standard. Dont's is a misspelling. Don't's is an over-correction. When in doubt, remember that pluralizing is the easiest operation in English: add s, touch nothing else.

Dos and Don'ts, Do's and Don'ts, or Dos and Don't's?

Now for the phrase that causes most of the searches. A list of recommended and forbidden behaviors is a list of dos and don'ts, and here, honestly, the style guides do not fully agree on the first word.

The AP Stylebook says dos and don'ts. No apostrophe in dos, the regular plural don'ts for the second word. This is the form you will see in most American journalism, and it follows the strict logic that apostrophes mark omissions or possession, never plurals.

The Chicago Manual of Style allows do's and don'ts. Chicago's editors acknowledge that dos on its own is awkward; readers may momentarily parse it as DOS, the operating system, or as a Spanish number. So Chicago permits an apostrophe in do's purely as a readability aid, the same way most guides allow "mind your p's and q's." Note the asymmetry Chicago ends up with: do's takes an apostrophe, but don'ts still does not take an extra one, because it already has its contraction apostrophe doing real work.

Dictionaries lean toward dos and don'ts. Merriam-Webster lists dos and don'ts as the primary form with do's and don'ts as a variant. Most usage manuals follow the same order: the apostrophe-free dos is preferred, the apostrophe version tolerated.

What no guide accepts is dos and dont's or do's and dont's. However the first word is styled, the second word is always don'ts, with the apostrophe in its original home between the n and the t. The variation in this phrase lives entirely in do; the spelling of don'ts is settled.

If you want one defensible rule for your own writing: use dos and don'ts by default, switch to do's and don'ts only if your house style follows Chicago or you judge that dos will confuse your readers, and stay consistent within a document.

Examples in Sentences

Here is the correct plural at work:

• The orientation packet lists the don'ts first, because new hires remember warnings better than permissions.
• Every culture has its dining don'ts; learn them before the trip, not during dinner.
• Her style guide is mostly don'ts: don't bury the verb, don't stack adjectives, don't open with the weather.
• We turned the postmortem into a short list of dos and don'ts for the next launch.
• One of the great don'ts of email is replying all to say thanks.

And some common errors with their corrections:

• Wrong: The handbook covers the major dont's of lab safety. → Right: The handbook covers the major don'ts of lab safety.
• Wrong: Here are five do's and dont's for your first marathon. → Right: Here are five dos and don'ts for your first marathon. (Or do's and don'ts, if your style guide permits the first apostrophe.)
• Wrong: Grandma's list of don't's filled two pages. → Right: Grandma's list of don'ts filled two pages.
• Wrong: Social media donts every brand should know. → Right: Social media don'ts every brand should know. (Dropping the apostrophe entirely leaves a non-word.)

Notice that in every correct version, you could cover the s with your thumb and be left with the ordinary word don't, spelled exactly as it always is. That is the test: the plural should contain the singular, intact.

Don'ts vs Dont's: Side by Side

Aspect	Don'ts	Dont's
Status	Standard plural of don't	Misspelling
What the apostrophe marks	The omitted o of not, in its original position	Nothing; it falsely signals possession
Pluralization rule	Add s to the contraction, change nothing else	Breaks the rule by relocating the apostrophe
Style guide acceptance	Accepted by AP, Chicago, and every major dictionary	Accepted by none
Spell-checker behavior	Passes	Usually flagged or autocorrected
Base word left intact?	Yes: remove the s and don't remains	No: remove the 's and you get the non-word dont

The table tells one story from six angles: don'ts is don't plus s, while dont's dismantles the contraction to build a possessive that nobody asked for.

How to Remember

Use this mnemonic: the apostrophe belongs to "n't," and it never moves.

The apostrophe in don't was placed there for a reason that has nothing to do with plurals. It is the tombstone of the o in not, and tombstones stay put. When you pluralize, you are doing something to the end of the word, so the s goes at the end, past the t, without disturbing anything inside.

If you prefer a physical trick, write don't, then ask yourself what one more of them would look like. You would not reach inside the word and rearrange it; you would just append an s, the same way kid becomes kids. Don't → don'ts. The word should still be readable as don't the instant you ignore the final letter.

And if you ever hesitate over the famous phrase, anchor yourself to the second word first. Don'ts is non-negotiable. Then choose dos or do's according to your style guide, and you are done.

Related Spelling Mixups

Apostrophe placement is only one of the ways English spelling ambushes fast typists. If the don'ts or dont's question brought you here, two neighboring mixups are worth a look. The first is peices vs pieces, a classic i-before-e stumble where muscle memory outruns the spelling rule. The second is creater or creator, where the familiar -er ending of maker and builder tempts writers away from the correct Latin-derived -or. Like dont's, both errors come from applying a pattern that is usually right to a word where it is not, which is exactly why they feel so plausible in the moment. The apostrophe causes trouble well beyond this word: havnt vs havent shows where the mark lands when a contraction drops a letter, mens vs mens settles the possessive of a noun that is already plural, and patients vs patients keeps a plain plural apart from its possessive. For the principle underneath all of them, plural vs possessive explains why an apostrophe never makes a word plural in the first place.

Conclusion

The plural of don't is don'ts, full stop. The apostrophe entered the word to mark the missing o of not, it lives between the n and the t, and pluralization never gives it a reason to move; you simply add an s. Dont's fails because it dissolves the contraction and dresses the word up as a possessive, and don't's fails because no English word needs two apostrophes to add an s. The only genuine variation lives in the companion phrase: AP style writes dos and don'ts, Chicago permits do's and don'ts for readability, and dictionaries list both with the apostrophe-free dos in front. Pick one, stay consistent, and spell don'ts the same way in every version. Once you see the apostrophe as a placeholder rather than a plural marker, this entire family of errors loses its grip. For more spelling calls like this one, browse the full collection of commonly confused words.