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So I am often writing about VLANs in a design. Sometimes in the singular, and sometimes in the plural. But when I write about multiple VLAN’s, which way would most people write it.
Is it VLANs, VLANS, or VLAN’s ? Lets have a vote and see if we can get agreement. If there is a proper rule for the grammar, lets hear about it in the comments.
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(2 votes, average: 6.50 out of 10)
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Greg is a Network and Security Architect / Designer / Engineer working freelance in the UK and worked for Resellers, DotCom's, Large Corporate's and Service Providers across a variety of products & Vendors. He prefers to work for end users, believes in the life cycle, total cost of ownership and that near enough is often good enough. He likes talking about himself in the first person to feel "royal", even when hosting the Packet Pushers Podcast on Data Networking. More about Greg at http://etherealmind.com/who-am-i/ and you can follow him on Twitter.
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It’s simple grammar. VLAN’s is not valid because it is not possessive. Remember, apostrophes replace vowels. VLANS is not valid because the S is not part of the acronym and therefore should not be capatalized. Finally, VLANs is correct because if you spell out the acronym, you would get “Virtual Local Area Networks”. Not “Virtual Local Area Network’s”, or “Virtual Local Area NetworkS”.
It should be noted of course that VLAN’s would be appropriate in some usage, such as if you were to say “That particular VLAN’s number is 100″, because that would then expand to “That particular Virtual Local Area Network’s number is 100.”
Grammar 101.
+1
I agree with IPv6Freely…. Not posessive, so no apostrophe.
My grammar senses were tingling, but I’m glad to see that IPv6Freely set the record straight.
+1 for IPv6Freely’s argument.
VLAN’s is technically correct when referring to multiples, as initialisms (VLAN is an initialism) were originally pluralized with an apostrophe. This was when intialisms were largely written with periods such as V.L.A.N.’s.
However, now that it’s more common to omit the periods (atleast in British English), it’s now also more common to pluralize these as ordinary English nouns, without an apostrophe.
IPv6Freely’s argument leans in the correct direction, but isn’t 100% accurate. +0.5
There are 15 VLANs on the switch. You should check the VLAN’s spanning tree configuration..