2026 update: The Google trick below has dated, and the AI version of it will hand Australians the wrong answer. The grammar still holds. Jump to the update at the foot if you just want the rule.
Believe it or not, Google can improve your writing.
A trainee on one of my courses asked me a tricky question recently: Should an apostrophe be used in this phrase or not?
“one night’s accommodation”
i.e. does the night “own” the accommodation
What if it was plural, as in “five nights accommodation”?
Do you know the answer? If you aren’t sure, and want to do a quick ‘n’ dirty check, try Google.
The trick
Just Google both options, using inverted commas (” “) around your search phrase, to see which gets the highest results. So you’d first search for “one nights accommodation” (26,000 hits), then “one night’s accommodation” (114,000 hits). Clearly the latter is the most used version, and, as it happens, is correct.
But now try the plural version: “five nights accommodation” (8,000 hits) vs. “five night’s accommodation” (112 hits). Again, a resounding win for the former, this time without the apostrophe. And it’s correct. [Source: Aust. Govt Style Manual, 6th edition.]
The exception
The only caveat is that the number of Google hits must be wildly different. If similar, don’t trust them; look it up elsewhere. For example, “two night’s accommodation” yields 64,000 hits, while “two nights accommodation” gets fewer hits, 61,000, yet is correct.
This method isn’t foolproof (because a lot of fools write badly on the Web), but it is a quick way to double check your hunch. And if American vs. British spellings cause problems, use the country-specific version of Google, e.g. www.google.co.uk.
2026 update: the trick has aged, the answer hasn’t
The post above was written when Google hit counts were a decent rough guide. They aren’t any more. Those numbers were always estimates, and the results page has changed so much that holding two of them up against each other tells you almost nothing.
The modern version of the trick is to ask an AI. Which works beautifully, right up until it doesn’t.
Ask most AI tools whether it’s ‘five nights accommodation’ or ‘five nights’ accommodation’ and you’ll probably get the apostrophe. Confidently. Politely. Wrongly, if you’re writing for an Australian organisation.
That’s because they’ve read far more American and British English than Australian, and those style guides do put an apostrophe there.
Same mistake, newer box. Counting the crowd isn’t the same as checking the rule.
The rule, from the current Style Manual
The 6th edition I cited above has been replaced by the digital Australian Government Style Manual. The answer hasn’t changed.
Singular time reference takes an apostrophe:
a day’s work. The year’s cycle. One night’s accommodation.
Plural time periods don’t:
6 weeks time. 3 months wages. Five nights accommodation.
That covers a lot more ground than hotel bookings. Days notice. Weeks time. Months wages. Same rule every time.
And it really is an Australian answer. Chicago and most UK guides would give you ‘five nights’ accommodation’. Follow them in an Australian document and you’ll be consistently, internationally wrong.
What to do instead
Don’t ask AI which version is more common. Ask it what the rule is, and where the rule comes from.
‘What does the Australian Government Style Manual say about apostrophes with time periods? Quote the section and link it.’
Then open the link and check. Ten seconds, and it beats a hit count.
That’s the whole difference between using AI as a vote counter and using it as a research assistant. It’s the sort of thing we drill in our business writing training, and in more depth over at Magneto Mentor AI.
3 thoughts on “Using Google to write right”
I’m going to have to be pedantic here. Five night’s accommodation was just plain wrong as you placed a singular construction with a multiple noun. While there is a personal usage bias and the evolution of language means that solutions we use grammatically can look “quaint” twenty years on (Mr. Rudd vs Mr Rudd, for example”) but you get about 1,340 for “five nights’ accommodation” which is actually what I would consider correct.
Money and time take apostrophes in some cases, so you need to decide whether they possess the object in question or not. Five night’s was wrong, regardless. Whether five nights’ could be correct is still being debated, from what I can see.
I think we actually agree, Sadhbh. I said the former (without the apostrophe) was correct, not the latter.
As to whether it’s “five nights’ accommodation,” (apostrophe after the “s”) I get the same result (1420) for both – with and without the apostrophe. As I said, this is a quick ‘n’ DIRTY technique, and you should only let it guide you if the Google results are wildly different.
In that case, I’d go to an official source, like the Australian Government Publishing Service’s latest Style Manual, which says to leave the apostrophe off. They’re not infallible either, of course, but these things are a matter of “convention” anyway, so you could be pretty confident following their advice.
By the way, your point about “Mr. Rudd” vs. “Mr Rudd” is good. At school and uni I learned that if an abbreviation ended in the same letter that the word it was abbreviating ended in, you didn’t need a period. So “Mister” could be “Mr”, but “Professor” should be “Prof.” (with a period). Anyone disagree?
Interesting post.
Writing for Google re SEO you may in fact have to break the rules sometimes to gain the eyeballs of your readers. For examples many companies spell common mispellings incorrectly as they know they will garner the eyeballs that way. Ensuring you get the visibility you need with the right content is paramount.
Jenni Beattie
Director
http://digitaldemocracy.com.au/
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