diff --git a/lib/tokenize.js b/lib/tokenize.js
index 6ac47a4..1c9a502 100644
--- a/lib/tokenize.js
+++ b/lib/tokenize.js
@@ -6,9 +6,19 @@
  * @return {array}        Array of tokens
  */
 module.exports = function(input) {
-    return input
+    input = input
         .toLowerCase()
         .replace(/\n/g, ' ')
         .replace(/[.,\/#!$%\^&\*;:{}=_`\"~()]/g, '')
         .split(' ');
+    // remove single quotes surrounding words but preserve apostrophes
+    var i;
+    for (i = 0; i < input.length; i++) {
+        var word = input[i];
+        if (word[0] === '\'' && word[word.length-1] === '\'') {
+            word = word.substr(1, word.length-2);
+            input[i] = word;
+        }   
+    }
+    return input;
 };
diff --git a/test/unit/tokenize.js b/test/unit/tokenize.js
index 4d8795f..81b0230 100644
--- a/test/unit/tokenize.js
+++ b/test/unit/tokenize.js
@@ -28,6 +28,18 @@ test('english', function (t) {
         tokenize('That\'ll cause problems for the farmer\'s pigs'),
         ['that\'ll', 'cause', 'problems', 'for', 'the', 'farmer\'s', 'pigs']
     );
+    t.deepEqual(
+        tokenize('Evan is \'wrong,\', says the more qualified governor'),
+        ['evan', 'is', 'wrong', 'says', 'the','more', 'qualified', 'governor']
+    );
+    t.deepEqual(
+        tokenize('Dad told me I can be the \'honorary\' chef!'),
+        ['dad', 'told', 'me', 'i', 'can', 'be', 'the','honorary', 'chef']
+    );
+    t.deepEqual(
+        tokenize('\'Complacent\' and \'undervalued\' is a bad combination'),
+        ['complacent', 'and', 'undervalued', 'is', 'a', 'bad', 'combination']
+    );
     t.end();
 });