The mark we call an apostrophe probably originated in 1509, in an Italian edition of Petrarch, or in 1529, at the hand of the French printer Geoffroy Tory, who is also credited with inventing the accent and the cedilla.

The words for both the punctuation mark and the dramatic device come from a Greek verb, apostrephein, meaning “to turn away.” But they took slightly different paths en route to English, with the dramatic device passing through Latin and the punctuation through Late Latin and French.