Frequency One analysis found the average frequencies for English punctuation marks, based on 723,000 words of assorted texts, to be as follows (as of 2013, but with some
text corpora dating to 1998 and 1987):
Apostrophe The apostrophe , sometimes called
inverted comma in
British English, is used to mark
possession, as in ''"John's book"
, and to mark letters omitted in contractions, such as you're
for you are''.
Brackets Brackets (, , {{angbr| { } }}, ) are used for
parenthesis, explanation or comment: such as
"John Smith (the elder, not his son)..." Colon The colon is used to start an
enumeration, as in
Her apartment needed a few things: a toaster, a new lamp, and a nice rug. It is used between two clauses when the second clause otherwise clarifies the first, as in
I can barely keep my eyes open: I hardly got a wink of sleep.
Comma The comma is used to disambiguate the meaning of
sentences, by providing boundaries between clauses and phrases. For example, "Man, without his cell phone, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of cell phone) and "Man: without, his cell phone is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men) have greatly different meanings, as do "eats shoots and leaves" (to mean "consumes plant growths") and "
eats, shoots and leaves" (to mean "eats firstly, fires a weapon secondly, and leaves the scene thirdly"). The frequency and specifics of the latter use vary widely, over time and regionally. For example, these marks are usually left out of
acronyms and initialisms today, and in many British publications they are omitted from contractions such as
Dr for
Doctor, where the abbreviation begins and ends with the same letters as the full word. Another use of this character, as the
decimal point, is found in mathematics and computing (where it is often nicknamed the "dot"), dividing whole numbers from
decimal fractions, as in
2,398.45.
In computing, the dot is used as a
delimiter more broadly, as site and file names ("wikipedia.org", "192.168.0.1" "document.txt"), and serves special functions in various
programming and
scripting languages.
Question marks The
question mark is used to mark the end of a sentence which is a question.
Quotation marks Quotation marks (, , , ) are used in pairs to set off
quotation, with two levels for distinguishing nested quotations: single and double. North American publishers of English texts tend to favour double quotation marks for the primary quotation, switching to single for any quote-within-a-quote, while British and Commonwealth publishers may use either single or double for primary quotation, also switching to the alternative for any nested. Further nesting (quote-within-a-quote-within-a-quote) reverts to the primary marks, and so forth. Question marks, exclamation marks, semicolons and colons are placed inside the quotation marks when they apply only to the quoted material; if they syntactically apply to the sentence containing or introducing the material, they are placed outside the marks. In British publications (and those throughout the Commonwealth of Nations more broadly), periods and commas are most often treated the same way, but usage varies widely. In American publications, periods and commas are usually placed inside the quotation marks regardless. The American system, also known as ''typographer's quotation'', is also common in Canadian English, and in fiction broadly. A third system, known as
logical quotation, is strict about not including terminal punctuation within the quotation marks unless it was also found in the quoted material. Some writers conflate logical quotation and the common British style (which actually permits some variation, such as replacement of an original full stop with a comma or vice versa, to suit the needs of the quoting sentence, rather than moving the non-original punctuation outside the quotation marks). For example,
The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed.: "The British style is strongly advocated by some American language experts. Whereas there clearly is some risk with question marks and exclamation points, there seems little likelihood that readers will be misled concerning the period or comma." It goes on to recommend "British" or logical quotation for fields such as
linguistics,
literary criticism, and
technical writing, and also notes its use in
philosophy texts.
Semicolon The semicolon is used to separate two independent but related clauses:
My wife would like tea; I would prefer coffee. The semicolon is also used to separate list items when the list items contain commas: ''"She saw three men: Jamie, who came from New Zealand; John, the milkman's son; and George, a gaunt kind of man."''
Slash The
slash, stroke, solidus or oblique (, ) is often used to indicate alternatives, such as
"his/her", or two equivalent meanings or spellings, such as
"grey/gray". The slash is used in certain set phrases, such as the conjunction
"and/or". ==References==