their

there

they're

As the old joke goes, that’s what you say to an unhappy grammarian. So if we must have three spellings of a word, how can we remember to use them in the right contexts?

A little green man can help us remember!

Firstly, line them up in alphabetical order.

their, there, they're

Start with their, which means belonging to them. Remember the 'i' in the middle is a person who owns the things.

They bought their house, their car and their helicopter with their lottery winnings.

There tells us we are talking about a place not a person. Think about similar words that use 'ere'.

We can be in many places: here, there, anywhere.

Finally, we come back to the apostrophe rule that you replace a letter that is missing. If what you mean is 'they are', the missing 'a' is replaced by the apostrophe.

They're still very nice people.

So how does Yoda help us? Because, in alphabetical order, they mean:

their –  belonging

there - we are going to that place

they are - contracted to they're

Memory jogger: Yoda says, 'Belonging to that place, they are.'

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