What is the short form for 'little' ? Is it li'l or lil'? [closed]

Where does the apostrophe go in the short form for 'little'? Is it li'l or lil'? What about no apostrophe?

You can find examples of each online:

• Lil' Choo-Choo Johnson, Bluesman
• Li'l Santa
• Secret Rescuer Lil Buddy and His Adventures

However, dictionaries like Lexico don't have entries for any of the forms.

Ngram shows li'l beating out lil' and li'l' since before 1900. (Note that you must 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 Ngram apparently uses to process the single quote symbol. But even if we ignore the Ngram results, the following argument is still quite strong:

Li'l is understandably common since 1934 since the comic strip Li'l Abner was published from 1934 through 1977. This strip was extremely popular and was at one time read (in 900 newspapers) by 70 million of the then 180 million Americans, likely well over half of the adult population. Considering that hundreds of newspapers published this strip daily for 43 years, the frequency of li'l appearing in print almost certainly outstripped any other version by an order of magnitude. Likewise, since the strip was so highly read, the familiarity of the public with the spelling li'l would have been far above their familiarity with any other version. (But it's interesting to note that, according to Ngram, the li'l version was more popular since about 1900, well before the strip started.)

(Li'l Abner is a worthwhile subject of study for other reasons, since it is responsible for creating outright or popularizing several words and phrases.)

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

Wikipedia

"Lil" is a kind of prefix and is the short form of "little". It is often spelled with an apostrophe as "Lil'" or "Li'l".

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

and some examples (also from Wiki)

Lil' 1/2 Dead, American rapper

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

What I learned in grammar school in the 1950s and 1960s

(And explaining in plain baby language where the ' goes when you shorten a word)

When you use the short form for a word, you put the ' in place of the letters that were left out to make the word's short form.

For example, the short form for the word LITTLE is LI'L.

Like "My dog is a li'l angel."

You are leaving the two letters T and T out, and so in their place goes the ' to indicate where the letters were omitted to take the word from long to short.... In this case, the E at the end of LITTLE is silent anyway, so it's not even treated. It's just dropped.

It's is the short form for It is. - The I in IS is left out and the apostrophe is put in its place to indicate where the letter was dropped to make it a short form word. Hasn't is another example. The apostrophe goes where the o in not is omitted. And so on...