Why the semicolon could die out

Telegraph

19-05-2025

It is a piece of punctuation that has divided writers and authors for centuries.
Novelists including Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen have not shied away from using them, but that has not stopped critics branding writers who use them 'an embarrassment to their families and friends'.
Now the semicolon could be dying out, according to research.
Although once a central part of punctuation, usage of the semi-colon has almost halved over the past 20 years following Tony Blair's New Labour heyday, according to the makers of language-learning app Babbel.
Young people who do not know how to use semicolons are behind the decline, the research suggests.
Babbel used Google Ngram, a specialised version of the search engine that searches five million English-language books, to look up how often semicolons had appeared in British English between the year 2000 and 2022.
They were used after one in every 205 words in 2000 but now follow just one in every 390 words, a decline of 47 per cent since the millennium.
More than half (54 per cent) of young Britons surveyed by the app company do not know the rules around correct usage of semicolons, while 28 per cent simply do not use the mark at all in their writing.
Sofia Zambelli, a spokesman for the app company, said: 'Our findings reveal that the semicolon is an 'endangered' punctuation mark; abandoned by many British writers who might have been expected to showcase its value, and often misunderstood by younger generations.
'Our data shows that Gen Z is not rejecting the semicolon; rather, they fear using it incorrectly.
'The semicolon, in particular, presents a challenge for many English learners. Whilst searching for best-use cases to illustrate the practicality and beauty of the semicolon, we found many historical texts but fewer contemporary examples.'
The year 1781 was found to be the peak of its deployment, Babbel claimed, with one of the marks to be found, on average, every 90 words in continuous prose.
Ben Jonson, the 16th-century English poet and contemporary of Shakespeare, described the semicolon as a 'somewhat longer breath' designed to introduce a pause into a sentence, bridging the gap between a full stop and the shorter interval introduced by the comma.
Modern grammatical rules dictate that the semicolon is used to conjoin two separate clauses into a single sentence without the use of a conjunction.
A famous example from English literature comes from the opening line of Charles Dickens' 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities: 'It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.'
The versatile mark can also be used to lay out a list in prose without resorting to bulleted or numbered points.
The University of Sussex gives three firm rules for the semicolon's usage in other scenarios: 'The two sentences are felt to be too closely related to be separated by a full stop; there is no connecting word which would require a comma, such as and or but; the special conditions requiring a colon are absent.'
Italian humanists are believed to be the inventors of the semicolon, with a Venetian treatise about Mount Etna published in the year 1494 being its first appearance in writing according to Paris Review magazine.
'It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly,' Cecelia Watson wrote in the periodical, giving a précis of her 2019 book which she simply titled Semicolon.
Illustrating the punctuation mark's usage in a review of Ms Watson's tome, the New Yorker magazine's Mary Norris added in the same year: 'I don't hate semicolons; I hate writing about semicolons.'