# Is "womens" a word?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-womens-a-word/442152>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [March 20, 2008, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-womens-a-word/442152 "2008-03-20T23:35:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 3

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bufftabby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/77aa72/32.png) [@bufftabby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bufftabby)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2008, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-womens-a-word/442152/41 "2008-03-22T14:32:19Z")

</div>

Oh, and on _cleaners_ v. _cleaner’s_, one would assume that more than one person works there and does the cleaning.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![rayh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@rayh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rayh)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2008, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-womens-a-word/442152/42 "2008-03-22T15:23:42Z")

</div>

Magee-Womens Hospital was named after Elizbeth Steel Magee, according to [this](http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-507785181.html).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Terrifel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c68b51/32.png) [@Terrifel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terrifel)\
**Post date:** [March 23, 2008, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-womens-a-word/442152/43 "2008-03-23T01:08:55Z")

</div>

> [@TWDuke](#):
>
> Anyway, the plural possessive of “woman” is “women’s” but the, ahem, correct way of spelling the hospital’s name is indeed “Magee-Womens Hospital,” per the UPMC Branding Guide (PDF).

And yet they offer no explanation why. Surely they must realize that their idiosyncratic “hyphen/no apostrophe” arrangement is bizarre and against all the laws of punctuation, or they wouldn’t need to caution against using the conventional form.

[QUOTE=rayh]  
Magee-Womens Hospital was named after Elizbeth Steel Magee, according to [this](http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-507785181.html).  
[/QUOTE]  
And as the article’s title reveals, yet another poor bastard of a copy editor has been lured into their weird trap. “Of course it’s ‘Magee Women’s Hospital!’” No, copy editor; you forgot to anticipate the incomprehensible mind games that are apparently characteristic of Pittsburgh women, and now you can never trust your own judgment again. Is Magee-Womens Hospital part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center… or perhaps it’s the “University-of-Pitt’sburgh (Medical) Center?” You can’t be sure! You can’t be sure of anything anymore.

Maybe Elizabeth Steel Magee was just a really poor writer? Or maybe she went through life haunted by inappropriate hyphenation of her own name, and this was her revenge.

[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-womens-a-word/442152.md?page=2)