What character is this possessive apostrophe: ’
Section 6.2 of the Unicode Standard 7.0.0 states:


  U+2019 […] is preferred where the character is to represent a punctuation mark, as for contractions: “We’ve been here before.”


The character does not appear directly on any keyboard I own.

On an British or US English keyboard you can use Option+Shift+] to type the character: ’ == U+2019; thanks to @tom-gewecke for this key combination.

Emoji &amp; Symbols Palette

In OS X 10.10, you can access this character from the menu item: Edit > Emoji &amp; Symbols:



Control-Click on the character to copy additional information.

In earlier versions of OS X, this palette was called the Character Palette.

Smart Quotes

The character ’ is can be automatically substituted by OS X through the Smart Quotes feature of the default text system:



Unicode is Complex

Copying and pasting a few of the candidate character information to a text file results in:


' - APOSTROPHE, Unicode: U+0027, UTF-8: 27
ʼ - MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE, Unicode: U+02BC, UTF-8: CA BC
՚ - ARMENIAN APOSTROPHE, Unicode: U+055A, UTF-8: D5 9A
＇ - FULLWIDTH APOSTROPHE, Unicode: U+FF07, UTF-8: EF BC 87


Ted Clancy's article Which Unicode character should represent the English apostrophe? (And why the Unicode committee is very wrong.) reveals just how involved the unicode character set can become.