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Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs.

By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically, according to their weight. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.

In rare cases, the meaning of a text can be changed substantially by using different punctuation, such as in "woman, without her man, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men to women), contrasted with "woman: without her, man is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of women to men). Similar changes in meaning can be achieved in spoken forms of most languages by using elements of speech such as suprasegmentals. The rules of punctuation vary with the language, location, register, and time. In online chat and text messages punctuation is used tachygraphically, especially among younger users.

History

Punctuation marks, especially spacing, were not needed in logographic or syllabic (such as Chinese and Mayan script) texts because disambiguation and emphasis could be communicated by employing a separate written form distinct from the spoken form of the language. Ancient Chinese classical texts were transmitted without punctuation. However, many Warring States period bamboo texts contain the symbols ⟨└⟩ and ⟨▄⟩ indicating the end of a chapter and full stop, respectively. By the Song dynasty, the addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common.

Western antiquity

During antiquity, most scribes in the West wrote in scriptio continua, i.e. without punctuation delimiting word boundaries. Around the 5th century BC, the Greeks began using punctuation consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually a dicolon or tricolon—as an aid in the oral delivery of texts. After 200 BC, Greek scribes adopted the théseis system invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, where a single dot called a punctus was placed at one of several heights to denote rhetorical divisions in speech:

• hypostigmḗ – a low punctus on the baseline to mark off a komma (a unit smaller than a clause)
• stigmḕ mésē – a punctus at midheight to mark off a clause (kōlon)
• stigmḕ teleía – a high punctus to mark off a sentence (periodos)

In addition, the Greeks used the paragraphos (or gamma) to mark the beginning of sentences, marginal diples to mark quotations, and a koronis to indicate the end of major sections.

During the 1st century BC, Romans also made occasional use of symbols to indicate pauses, but by the 4th century AD the Greek théseis—called distinctiones in Latin—prevailed, as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville (7th century). Latin texts were sometimes laid out per capitula, where each sentence was placed on its own line. Diples were used, but by the late period these often degenerated into comma-shaped marks.

Medieval

Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of the Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud, so the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation, various punctuation marks (diple, paragraphos, simplex ductus), and an early version of initial capitals (litterae notabiliores). Jerome and his colleagues, who made a translation of the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate (c. AD 400), employed a layout system based on established practices for teaching the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero. Under his layout per cola et commata every sense-unit was indented and given its own line. This layout was solely used for biblical manuscripts during the 5th–9th centuries but was abandoned in favor of punctuation.

In the 7th–8th centuries Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes, whose native languages were not derived from Latin, added more visual cues to render texts more intelligible. Irish scribes introduced the practice of word separation. Likewise, insular scribes adopted the distinctiones system while adapting it for minuscule script (so as to be more prominent) by using not differing height but rather a differing number of marks—aligned horizontally (or sometimes triangularly)—to signify a pause's duration: one mark for a minor pause, two for a medium one, and three for a major one. Most common were the punctus, a comma-shaped mark, and a 7-shaped mark (comma positura), often used in combination. The same marks could be used in the margin to mark off quotations.

In the late 8th century a different system emerged in France under the Carolingian dynasty. Originally indicating how the voice should be modulated when chanting the liturgy, the positurae migrated into any text meant to be read aloud, and then to all manuscripts. Positurae first reached England in the late 10th century, probably during the Benedictine reform movement, but was not adopted until after the Norman conquest. The original positurae were the punctus, punctus elevatus, punctus versus, and punctus interrogativus, but a fifth symbol, the punctus flexus, was added in the 10th century to indicate a pause of a value between the punctus and punctus elevatus. In the late 11th/early 12th century the punctus versus disappeared and was taken over by the simple punctus (now with two distinct values).

The late Middle Ages saw the addition of the virgula suspensiva (slash or slash with a midpoint dot) which was often used in conjunction with the punctus for different types of pauses. Direct quotations were marked with marginal diples, as in Antiquity, but from at least the 12th century scribes also began entering diples (sometimes double) within the column of text.

Printing-press era

The amount of printed material and its readership began to increase after the invention of moveable type in Europe in the 1450s. Martin Luther's German Bible translation was one of the first mass printed works, he used only virgule, full stop and less than one percent question marks as punctuation. The focus of punctuation still was rhetorical, to aid reading aloud. As explained by writer and editor Lynne Truss, "The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required." Printed books, whose letters were uniform, could be read much more rapidly than manuscripts. Rapid reading, or reading aloud, did not allow time to analyze sentence structures. This increased speed led to the greater use and finally standardization of punctuation, which showed the relationships of words with each other: where one sentence ends and another begins, for example.

The introduction of a standard system of punctuation has also been attributed to the Venetian printers Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They have been credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop (period), inventing the semicolon, making occasional use of parentheses, and creating the modern comma by lowering the virgule. By 1566, Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax.

By the 19th century, punctuation in the Western world had evolved "to classify the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight". Cecil Hartley's poem identifies their relative values:

The stop point out, with truth, the time of pause
A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause.
At ev'ry comma, stop while one you count;
At semicolon, two is the amount;
A colon doth require the time of three;
The period four, as learned men agree.

The use of punctuation was not standardised until after the invention of printing. According to the 1885 edition of The American Printer, the importance of punctuation was noted in various sayings by children, such as:

Charles the First walked and talked
Half an hour after his head was cut off.

With a semicolon and a comma added, it reads as follows:

Charles the First walked and talked;
Half an hour after, his head was cut off.

In a 19th-century manual of typography, Thomas MacKellar writes:

Shortly after the invention of printing, the necessity of stops or pauses in sentences for the guidance of the reader produced the colon and full point. In process of time, the comma was added, which was then merely a perpendicular line, proportioned to the body of the letter. These three points were the only ones used until the close of the fifteenth century, when Aldo Manuccio gave a better shape to the comma, and added the semicolon; the comma denoting the shortest pause, the semicolon next, then the colon, and the full point terminating the sentence. The marks of interrogation and admiration were introduced many years after.

Typewriters and electronic communication

The introduction of electrical telegraphy with a limited set of transmission codes and typewriters with a limited set of keys influenced punctuation subtly. For example, curved quotes and apostrophes were all collapsed into two characters (' and "). The hyphen, minus sign, and dashes of various widths have been collapsed into a single character (-), sometimes repeated to represent a long dash. The spaces of different widths available to professional typesetters were generally replaced by a single full-character width space, with typefaces monospaced. In some cases a typewriter keyboard did not include an exclamation point (!), which could otherwise be constructed by the overstrike of an apostrophe and a period; the original Morse code did not have an exclamation point.

These simplifications have been carried forward into digital writing, with teleprinters and the ASCII character set essentially supporting the same characters as typewriters. Treatment of whitespace in HTML discouraged the practice (in English prose) of putting two full spaces after a full stop, since a single or double space would appear the same on the screen. (Most style guides now discourage double spaces, and some electronic writing tools, including Misplaced Pages's software, automatically collapse double spaces to single.) The full traditional set of typesetting tools became available with the advent of desktop publishing and more sophisticated word processors. Despite the widespread adoption of character sets like Unicode that support the punctuation of traditional typesetting, writing forms like text messages tend to use the simplified ASCII style of punctuation, with the addition of new non-text characters like emoji. Informal text speak tends to drop punctuation when not needed, including some ways that would be considered errors in more formal writing.

In the computer era, punctuation characters were recycled for use in programming languages and URLs. Due to its use in email and Twitter handles, the at sign (@) has gone from an obscure character mostly used by sellers of bulk commodities (10 pounds @$2.00 per pound), to a very common character in common use for both technical routing and an abbreviation for "at". The tilde (~), in moveable type only used in combination with vowels, for mechanical reasons ended up as a separate key on mechanical typewriters, and like @ it has been put to completely new uses.

In English

There are two major styles of punctuation in English: British or American. These two styles differ mainly in the way in which they handle quotation marks, particularly in conjunction with other punctuation marks. In British English, punctuation marks such as full stops and commas are placed inside the quotation mark only if they are part of what is being quoted, and placed outside the closing quotation mark if part of the containing sentence. In American English, however, such punctuation is generally placed inside the closing quotation mark regardless. This rule varies for other punctuation marks; for example, American English follows the British English rule when it comes to semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points. The serial comma is used much more often in the United States than in the UK.

Other languages

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Other languages of Europe use much the same punctuation as English. The similarity is so strong that the few variations may confuse a native English reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French and Russian, quotes would appear as: « Je suis fatigué. » (In French, the quotation marks are spaced from the enclosed material; in Russian they are not.)

In the French of France and Belgium, the marks ⟨:⟩, ⟨;⟩, ⟨?⟩ and ⟨!⟩ are preceded by a thin space. In Canadian French, this is only the case for ⟨:⟩.

In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point ⟨·⟩, known as the ano teleia (άνω τελεία).

In Georgian, three dots ⟨჻⟩ were formerly used as a sentence or paragraph divider. It is still sometimes used in calligraphy.

Spanish and Asturian (both of them Romance languages used in Spain) use an inverted question mark ⟨¿⟩ at the beginning of a question and the normal question mark at the end, as well as an inverted exclamation mark ⟨¡⟩ at the beginning of an exclamation and the normal exclamation mark at the end.

Armenian uses several punctuation marks of its own. The full stop is represented by a colon, and vice versa; the exclamation mark is represented by a diagonal similar to a tilde ⟨~⟩, while the question mark ⟨՞⟩ resembles an unclosed circle placed after the last vowel of the word.

Arabic, Urdu, and Persian—written from right to left—use a reversed question mark: ⟨؟⟩, and a reversed comma: ⟨،⟩. This is a modern innovation; pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. Hebrew, which is also written from right to left, uses the same characters as in English, ⟨,⟩ and ⟨?⟩.

Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written using Devanagari, started using the vertical bar ⟨।⟩ to end a line of prose and double vertical bars ⟨॥⟩ in verse.

Punctuation was not used in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese Chu Nom writing until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the late 19th and early 20th century. In unpunctuated texts, the grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context. Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they often look different and have different customary rules.

In the Indian subcontinent, ⟨:-⟩ is sometimes used in place of colon or after a subheading. Its origin is unclear, but could be a remnant of the British Raj. Another punctuation common in the Indian Subcontinent for writing monetary amounts is the use of ⟨/-⟩ or ⟨/=⟩ after the number. For example, Rs. 20/- or Rs. 20/= implies 20 whole rupees.

Thai, Khmer, Lao and Burmese did not use punctuation until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the 20th century. Blank spaces are more frequent than full stops or commas.

Novel punctuation marks

Interrobang

In 1962, American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed the interrobang (‽), a combination of the question mark and exclamation point, to mark rhetorical questions or questions stated in a tone of disbelief. Although the new punctuation mark was widely discussed in the 1960s, it failed to achieve widespread use. Nevertheless, it and its inverted form were given code points in Unicode: U+203D ‽ INTERROBANG, U+2E18 ⸘ INVERTED INTERROBANG.

Predecessors of emoticons and emojis

The six additional punctuation marks proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l'Oiseau ("Let's pluck the bird", 1966) could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.

These were:

• the "irony point" or "irony mark" (point d'ironie: )
• the "love point" (point d'amour: )

  

• the "conviction point" (point de conviction: )
• the "authority point" (point d'autorité: )
• the "acclamation point" (point d'acclamation: )
• the "doubt point" (point de doute: )

"Question comma", "exclamation comma"

An international patent application was filed, and published in 1992 under World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) number WO9219458, for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma". The question comma has a comma instead of the dot at the bottom of a question mark, while the exclamation comma has a comma in place of the point at the bottom of an exclamation mark. These were intended for use as question and exclamation marks within a sentence, a function for which normal question and exclamation marks can also be used, but which may be considered obsolescent. The patent application entered into the national phase only in Canada. It was advertised as lapsing in Australia on 27 January 1994 and in Canada on 6 November 1995.

Others

Other proposed punctuation marks include:

• Snark mark, indicating an ironic statement by putting a tilde next to terminal punctuation: .~ for dry sarcasm, !~ for enthusiastic sarcasm, and ?~ for sarcastic questions
• Rhetorical question mark:
• SarcMark for sarcasm

Punctuation marks in Unicode

See also

• Diacritic
• James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher, a word puzzle
• Obelism, the practice of annotating manuscripts with marks set in the margins
• Orthography, the category of written conventions that includes punctuation as well as spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, and emphasis
• Scribal abbreviations, abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in Latin
• Terminal punctuation
• History of sentence spacing for typographical details
• Tironian notes, a system of shorthand that consisted of about 4,000 signs
• Usage

Notes

1. The Latin names for the marks are subdistinctio, media distinctio, and distinctio.

References

Citations

1. Encyclopædia Britannica: "Punctuation.
2. Byrne, Eugene. "Q&A: When were punctuation marks first used?". History Extra. BBC. Retrieved 14 February 2017.
3. Truss, Lynn (2004). Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. New York: Gotham Books. p. 112. ISBN 1-59240-087-6.
4. Bazin, Hervé (1966), Plumons l'oiseau, Paris (France): Éditions Bernard Grasset, p. 142
5. Truss, Lynne (2003). Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Profile Books. ISBN 1-86197-612-7.
6. 林清源，《簡牘帛書標題格式研究》台北： 藝文印書館，2006。(Lin Qingyuan, Study of Title Formatting in Bamboo and Silk Texts Taipei: Yiwen Publishing, 2006.) ISBN 957-520-111-6.
7. The History of the Song Dynasty (1346) states 「凡所讀書，無不加標點。」 (Among those who read texts, there are none who do not add punctuation).
8. E. Otha Wingo, Latin Punctuation in the Classical Age (The Hague, Netherlands: De Gruyter, 1972), 22.
9. Parkes, M. B. (1991). "The Contribution of Insular Scribes of the Seventh and Eighth Centuries to the 'Grammar of Legibility'". Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts. London: Hambledon Press. pp. 1–18.
10. "Paleography: How to Read Medieval Handwriting". Harvard University. Archived from the original on 8 December 2015. Retrieved 13 November 2017.
11. Raymond Clemens & Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca–London: Cornell UP, 2007), 84–6.
12. Historische Kommasetzung bei Luther, en: historical use of comma by Luther, Frank Slotta, for Prof Beatrice Primus, Landesprüfungsamt I NRW, 2010.
13. Truss, Lynne (2004). Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. New York: Gotham Books. p. 77. ISBN 1-59240-087-6.
14. Truss, Lynn (2004). Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. New York: Gotham Books. pp. 77–78. ISBN 1-59240-087-6.
15. Truss, Lynn (2004). Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. New York: Gotham Books. p. 112. ISBN 1-59240-087-6.
16. Truss, Lynn (2004). Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. New York: Gotham Books. pp. 112–113. ISBN 1-59240-087-6.
17. Iona and Peter Opie (1943) I Saw Esau.
18. MacKellar, Thomas (1885). The American Printer: A Manual of Typography, Containing Practical Directions for Managing all Departments of a Printing Office, As Well as Complete Instructions for Apprentices: With Several Useful Tables, Numerous Schemes for Imposing Forms in Every Variety, Hints to Authors, Etc (Fifteenth – Revised and Enlarged ed.). Philadelphia: MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan. p. 63.
19. See e.g. Morse code
20. Chelsea, Lee. "Punctuating Around Quotation Marks". APA Style. American Psychological Association. Retrieved 16 February 2017.
21. Bryan, Chloe (12 March 2019). "Why people leave a space before punctuation in texts". Mashable. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
22. Tetteroo, Jeroen (19 August 2015). "Designer's Style Guide to French Translation for Canada". LanguageSolutions. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
23. Put, Olga (26 February 2022). "What Is the Upside-Down Question Mark in Spanish?". Spanish Academy. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
24. "Punctuation in Different Languages". TranslateMedia. 11 July 2013. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
25. Prasoon, Shrikant (2015). English Grammar and Usage. New Delhi: V & S Publishers. pp. Chapter 6. ISBN 978-93-505742-6-3.
26. Haley, Allan (June 2001). "The Interrobang Is Back". fonthaus.com. Archived from the original on 7 May 2008. Retrieved 3 December 2010.
27. Bazin, Hervé (1966), Plumons l'oiseau, Paris (France): Éditions Bernard Grasset, p. 142
28. Revised preliminary proposal to encode six punctuation characters introduced by Hervé Bazin in the UCS by Mykyta Yevstifeyev and Karl Pentzlin, 28 Feb. 2012
29. "European Patent Office publication".
30. Australian Official Journal of Patents, 27 January 1994
31. CIPO – Patent – 2102803 – Financial Transactions Archived 2 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine
32. Brandon Specktor; Samantha Rideout (20 March 2019). "11 Little-Known Punctuation Marks We Should Be Using". Reader's Digest Canada.

Further reading

• Allen, Robert (25 July 2002). Punctuation. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860439-4.
• Amis, Kingsley (2 March 1998). The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-00-638746-2.
• Fowler, Henry Watson; Francis George Fowler (June 2002) . The King's English. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860507-2.
• Gowers, Ernest (1948). Plain Words: a guide to the use of English. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
• Houston, Keith (2013). Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities. Particular.
• Parkes, Malcolm Beckwith (1993). Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07941-8.
• Patt, Sebastian (2013). Punctuation as a Means of Medium-Dependent Presentation Structure in English: Exploring the Guide Functions of Punctuation. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8233-6753-6.

External links

• Larry Trask: Guide to Punctuation – a helpful online resource
• History of Punctuation (in French) – helpful photographs of early punctuation
• Punctuation Marks in English: Clarity in Expression
• Unicode reference tables:
  • Unicode collation charts—including punctuation marks, sorted by shape
  • "General punctuation U2000" (PDF).
  • "CJK Symbols and Punctuation U3000" (PDF).
  • "CJK Compatibility Forms UFE30" (PDF).
  • "Small Form Variants UFE50" (PDF).
  • "Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms UFF00" (PDF).
• Ethiopic script
• Automatic Recovery of Capitalization and Punctuation of Automatic Speech Transcripts
• English Punctuation Rules
• Punctuation marks with independent clauses, by Jennifer Frost

• Punctuation
• Typography