50 Fun Facts About Punctuation

The punctuation bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves takes its title from a joke about which animal?

Panda meals are shoots and leaves, but add one comma and the bear dines, fires a gun and walks out. Lynne Truss borrowed the joke for her 2003 guide to careful punctuation.

Which language opens questions with an upside-down question mark, as its royal academy advised in 1754?

Spanish brackets a question at both ends, so readers know the tone from the first word. The same academy ordered a matching upside-down exclamation mark.

Which 1962 invention by adman Martin Speckter fuses a question mark and an exclamation point?

Interrobang joins interrogation to bang, printers' slang for the exclamation mark. Speckter wanted one tidy sign for the incredulous questions that fill advertisements.

Which symbol, once recited as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, began as a joined-up Latin et?

Ampersand is a slurred form of the chant and per se and, which pupils recited when the symbol closed the alphabet. Its curves still hide the letters E and T.

What is the popular name for the optional mark before 'and' in a list such as red, white, and blue?

Oxford comma honours Oxford University Press, whose printer Horace Hart is most often credited with the habit. Editors call the same mark the serial comma.

In American telegrams, which word was spelled out to mark the end of a sentence in place of a period?

Stop was spelled out because a tiny dot was easily lost or misplaced in transmission. The US government spread the habit in wartime to keep messages from being garbled.

Which Amherst poet strewed her verse with dashes and odd capitals that her first editors removed?

Emily Dickinson complained that an editor's added comma and a period swapped for her dash altered the meaning of an entire poem. Her first collections were tidied the same way.

Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, the only town named with two exclamation marks, is in which Canadian province?

Quebec owes the name to haha, an archaic French word for an unexpected obstacle, here a sharp bend in a nearby lake. Guinness gave the town a world record for it in 2017.

The comma, named for a small white punctuation-shaped spot under its hindwing, is which kind of insect?

Butterfly watchers know the comma by ragged wings that look like a dead leaf when folded. A North American cousin with a curved line and a dot is called the question mark.

In mathematics, an exclamation mark written after a whole number tells you to carry out which operation?

Factorial means multiplying a number by every whole number below it, so 4! is 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 24. Mathematicians read that aloud as four factorial.

In standard American style, where do commas and periods sit relative to a closing quotation mark?

Inside it is the American rule, kept because the closer spacing was judged to look cleaner. British style lets logic decide, so a comma that was not in the original stays out.

Which of these titles do most style guides italicise, as a complete work, instead of using quotation marks?

A feature film is a complete work, so its title is italicised like that of a book, play or periodical. Pieces that sit within a bigger work get quotation marks.

Which of these titles takes quotation marks rather than italics because it is part of a larger work?

A song gets quotation marks while the album that holds it gets italics. The same split separates an episode from its television series.

In handwriting or on a typewriter, what traditionally stands in for italics in the title of a book?

Underlining in a manuscript told the typesetter to set those words in italic, which is why one usage manual calls italics its print equivalent.

Which journalists' style guide breaks with Chicago and MLA by putting book titles in quotation marks?

AP Stylebook rules put quotation marks around books, poems, speeches and works of art alike, and tell reporters never to italicise any of them.

The life-saving comma in 'Let's eat, Grandma' is required because Grandma is the person being what?

Spoken to is the test: a name used in speaking to someone is set off by commas, a rule grammarians call the vocative. Drop the mark and Grandma becomes the meal.

Mid-sentence, how do most style manuals punctuate the state in a pair such as Dallas, Texas?

A comma on each side is the rule because the state is treated as an aside, as in The plane landed in Kampala, Uganda, that evening. A country after a city works the same way.

What do the US Postal Service and Royal Mail advise doing with commas in an address on an envelope?

Leaving them out helps the machines: punctuation hinders the optical character recognition that reads addresses on letters and parcels.

Which three-dot punctuation mark, also known as suspension points, shows that words have been left out?

Ellipsis points can also mark a pause in speech or a thought left hanging. Some style guides add a period before the three dots when the cut falls between two sentences.

Which symbol, named from an ancient word meaning little star, most often calls out a lone footnote?

Asterisk marks were used by the ancient scholar Aristarchus of Samothrace to flag lines that were duplicated elsewhere in a text.

Which symbol usually marks the second footnote on a page and can also flag a date of death?

Dagger marks descend from the obelus, a line that scholars once drew beside passages in manuscripts to flag them. A third footnote takes the double dagger.

Bell Labs workers adding two keys to the telephone keypad coined which odd name for the hash sign?

Octothorpe was coined by 1968 because the eleventh and twelfth keys on the new keypad needed named symbols. The word first turned up in a US patent in a 1973 filing.

What is the name of the backwards-P symbol that medieval scribes drew in red to open a new paragraph?

Pilcrow shapes grew from a letter C, for the Latin capitulum, that rubricators dressed up with vertical bars and a filled-in bowl. Editors also call it the blind P.

What are the sideways double chevrons « », used as quotation marks in French, properly called?

Guillemets are apparently named after the printer Guillaume Le Bé, though he did not invent them: they first appear in a 1527 book printed by Josse Bade.

Which mark separates hours from minutes in a digital time and a book's title from its subtitle?

Colon duties also stretch to Bible citations, where the mark divides chapter from verse, and to the two numbers of a ratio.

Which paired marks did Erasmus nickname lunula, after the shape of the crescent moon?

Parentheses reminded Erasmus of little moons, so he coined a Latin nickname for them. Americans keep the longer word, while Britons often just say brackets.

Which mark, also known as a virgule or solidus, shows the line breaks when poetry is quoted in prose?

Slash marks keep the shape of a poem alive within a paragraph, since dropping the line breaks risks losing meaning. Britons often call the same mark a stroke.

Which mark, traditionally half the width of its longer cousin, joins the ends of a range like 1914–1918?

En dash use extends to linking two competitors or alternatives, and in a range it stands for the word to or through. Printers also know it as the en rule or nut dash.

Which V-shaped proofreader's mark, its name Latin for 'it lacks', shows where missing text belongs?

Caret marks sit below the line when the missing piece is low punctuation such as a comma, and are flipped above the line for a high mark such as an apostrophe.

Which symbol, common in citations of legal codes, looks like one letter S stacked on top of another?

Section sign shapes most probably began as two S glyphs joined together, from the Latin signum sectionis. Many other languages read the same symbol aloud as paragraph.

Which Latin word, placed in brackets after a quoted error, tells readers the mistake was in the original?

Sic means thus or so, a promise that the quotation was copied exactly as found. Usage guides advise using it to help the reader, not to sneer at the source.

What are quotation marks called when, like the phrase so-called, they signal a writer's doubt about a term?

Scare quotes also go by the names shudder quotes and sneer quotes. In conversation the same job is done by the hand gesture known as air quotes.

Which layout sets a long quoted passage apart as an indented paragraph, with no quote marks around it?

Block quotation is a leftover: some older books repeated a quote mark at the start of every line of a long passage, and when the habit died the empty margin remained.

In American English, what encloses a quote that is nested within another quote?

Single quotation marks go on the inner quote in American usage, while British English often flips the order and puts them on the outer one.

Which error joins two complete sentences too weakly, as in 'It was late, we went home'?

Comma splice is the name, and the usual cure is a semicolon. Writers who leave out conjunctions on purpose for effect are using a device called asyndeton.

A stray apostrophe in a plural such as apple's is nicknamed in Britain after which kind of shopkeeper?

Greengrocer signs were notorious for the slip, and the nickname is believed to have been coined in mid-20th-century Liverpool by a teacher of languages.

Which spelling correctly shows that something belongs to more than one child?

Children's follows the rule for plurals that do not end in s: add the apostrophe first and then the s, as with men's and women's.

Where does the apostrophe go to make a regular plural noun such as cats possessive?

After the final s is the spot, as in three cats' toys, because the plural already has its s and takes only the apostrophe.

Which eccentric New England businessman printed a book with no punctuation, then added a page of loose marks?

Timothy Dexter answered complaints by telling printers and readers to season the text with the extra marks wherever they pleased. He called the book A Pickle for the Knowing Ones.

What is the Latin term for the ancient habit of writing with no spaces or marks between words?

Scriptio continua means continuous script, and it copied speech, which has no gaps either. Spaces are generally traced to Irish and Anglo-Saxon Bibles of the seventh and eighth centuries.

Which Irish nationalist wrote that he would be 'hanged on a comma' after his 1916 treason trial?

Roger Casement had acted in Germany, and the medieval treason law seemed to cover only acts on home soil until the court read a comma into its unpunctuated Norman-French text.

Which Danish-American pianist and comedian gave every comma and period its own sound effect on stage?

Victor Borge called the act Phonetic Punctuation and put it on record in 1945. He later performed it on the educational television show The Electric Company.

English printer Henry Denham proposed a reversed question mark in the 1580s to end which kind of question?

Rhetorical questions need no answer, and Denham's mirror-image mark was meant to say so at a glance. It is now known as the percontation point.

Aristophanes of Byzantium devised dots set at three heights to punctuate texts in which ancient city?

Alexandria was where the system took shape in the 3rd century BCE: single dots set low, mid-line or high marked pauses of different lengths. The modern period descends from them.

Aldus Manutius, whose 1496 printing of Pietro Bembo used a semicolon, ran his press in which Italian city?

Venice struck Manutius as the best base for his work, and from there he helped to standardise the comma as well. His press also cut the first known italic type.

In which modern European language does the question mark look exactly like an English semicolon?

Greek readers end a question with that mark, and for the longer pause that English gives the semicolon they have a raised dot, though it is used extremely rarely.

With no comma, 'I cut down all the trees which were over six feet tall' contains which type of clause?

Restrictive clauses narrow the meaning, so here only the taller trees were felled. Add a comma before which and the clause becomes extra detail: every tree came down.

A missing comma in a Maine overtime law won a $5 million settlement from Oakhurst Dairy for which workers?

Truck drivers argued that, with no comma before the last item, the list of jobs exempt from overtime did not clearly include distribution. An appeals court agreed the wording was ambiguous.

A semicolon's most common job is to link two closely related units of which grammatical kind?

Independent clauses can each stand alone as a sentence, so the semicolon joins the pair without needing a conjunction such as and.

In 'a little-celebrated painting', the hyphen is there because little-celebrated is which kind of expression?

Compound modifier hyphens prevent misreading: a little-celebrated painting is an obscure one, while a little celebrated painting would be small and famous.