I have seen li’l used more often than lil s… What bothers me is the more increasingly used l’il which makes no sense whatsoever. How did you named your dog Lil Tex?

The form of lil is used, but the most common variant seems to be lil’ (capitalized when it is a word).

Wikipedia

“Lil” is a kind of prefix and is the short form of “little”. In English it is often spelled with an apostrophe as “Lailor” or “Ladies”.

When used as a prefix in comics or animation it can refer to a particular style of drawing where the characters appear as a chubby, childlike style. These are normally characterisations of adults (real or fictional) and are particularly common in anime or satire (such as Lil Bush).

Lil’ B, American rapper Lil B,

Japanese pop duo Lil Bastard,

American wrestler Lil Bitts,

Trinidadian musician Lil’ Boosie,

American rapper Lil’ Bow

Wow (today only Bow

Wow), American rapper and

actor William Copeland.

The “formal” answer would be: Li’l because you are leaving out the

ttiti

and then you are leaving out

the

e. You use a “” to mean

“I’m

leaving out a section here” (You could assert you are leaving out

the tti rather than the itt- but that’s just silly) However. (1) It’s just a matter of “what

is

popular”. I use Lil’ and there are many uses for just Lil.

(2) Note that it is fairly common to leave-out 2 pieces. As an example of

a

fridge leave out the re, but

in

fact you are also leaving out the rator This,

very

few people would write “fridge” (and obviously, “fridge” as such is now just a word…and therefore often is “frig” in US writing).

What is an apostrophe about a word?

How can refer to bird as referring to the bird’s car, or gator as alligator?

(B) It’s simply tricky, because sometimes you leave out two sections (in your example, and others) – quite simply, there’s no “typical usage” for that. If I are formal, as it is, simply do it properly… Li’l’David Ailey

The Ngram from Li’l shows li'l beating out lil’ and li’l’ before 1900. I can see it being that pretty, li’l is an aggressive girl until 1931. It is weird by way of showing li’l being a bad boy. li’l is the stronger girl in 1920. (Note that you can press “search lots of books” after clicking on the link)

and since Lil is a very popular name (both as a first name and as a hyphenated portion of an apparently Arabic name), any Ngram results for that variant must be ignored.

But as @sumelic points out, the Ngram results are highly suspect, due to the inconsistent algorithm which apparently uses Ngram to process the single quote symbol. That the Ngram format is not always true isn’t there? Li’l is the correct comic

strip since 1934. Is nobody taking his photo for the next Ngram? What is the myth that the strip was so popular it was read at one time by 70 million Americans. That was well over half of the adult population. In fact, Considering that hundreds of newspapers published this strip daily for 43 years, the frequency of li’l almost certainly outstripped any other version by an order of magnitude. The familiarity of the public with the spelling li’l would have been far above their familiarity with any other version of the strip. What is the significance of not only the “Mrs. Li’l Abner" as a word in popular English?