Usage of Semicolons In English Books Down Almost Half In Two Decades (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0177680827
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/21/2122224/usage-of-semicolons-in-english-books-down-almost-half-in-two-decades
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/18/marked-decline-semicolon-use-english-books-study-suggests
> "Do not use semicolons," wrote Kurt Vonnegut, who averaged fewer than 30 a novel (about one every 10 pages). "All they do is show you've been to college." A study suggests UK authors are taking Vonnegut's advice to heart; the semicolon seems to be in terminal decline, with its usage in English books [1]plummeting by almost half in two decades -- from one appearing in every 205 words in 2000 to one use in every 390 words today. Further research by Lisa McLendon, author of The Perfect English Grammar Workbook, found 67% of British students never or rarely use the semicolon. Just 11% of respondents described themselves as frequent users.
>
> Linguistic experts at the language learning software Babbel, which commissioned the original research, were so struck by their findings that they asked McLendon to give the 500,000-strong London Student Network a 10-question multiple-choice quiz on the semicolon. She found more than half of respondents did not know or understand how to use it. As defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English, the semicolon is "a punctuation mark indicating a pause, typically between two main clauses, that is more pronounced than that indicated by a comma." It is commonly used to link together two independent but related clauses, and is particularly useful for juxtaposition or replacing confusing extra commas in lists where commas already exist -- or where a comma would create a splice.
The Guardian has a semicolon quiz at the end of [2]the article where you can test your semicolon knowledge.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/18/marked-decline-semicolon-use-english-books-study-suggests
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/may/18/marked-decline-semicolon-use-english-books-study-suggests
Makes sense (Score:3)
More recently I've been writing a lot more Python than C/C++/Java that I'd have been writing previously, so fewer semicolons is to be expected...
Re: don't ask americans.... (Score:2)
A scotsman taught us Americans how to pronounce aluminium. Apparently in other English word adjacent vowels don't create phantom syllables, but this one is special.
Step 1. Invent the English language.
Step 2. Refuse to speak it.
Step 3. Laugh when foreigners talk funny.
Aluminum (Re: don't ask americans....) (Score:5, Interesting)
> A scotsman taught us Americans how to pronounce aluminium. Apparently in other English word adjacent vowels don't create phantom syllables, but this one is special.
The word in American and Canadian is "Aluminum" (no added i before the "um".)
"Aluminum" is the original spelling (and pronunciation), but Davy later thought that element names should end in "ium", and added the extra "i". (True for some elements, like helium and lithium, not true for others, like tantalum and platinum). So the American and Canadian version, aluminum, predates the British version, aluminium, by four years.
Aluminum and aluminium [Re:okay and] (Score:2)
> Although both spellings are officially accepted, the trend is very much to use the international spelling not the US/CA spelling.
Google n-gram viewer suggests the opposite; "aluminum" use is greater than "aluminium" use by a factor of 2.75:
[1]https://books.google.com/ngram... [google.com]
> This is because scholarly papers are found with keyword searches, and if you use a weird spelling of a word people won't find your work.
More scholarly papers are written in American English than in British English, so that's an argument to use the American spelling. Verifying, Google scholar gives 445,000 scholarly references with "aluminum" in the title, 239,000 with "aluminium" in the title. Not quite as lopsided a difference, but still far more scholarly use of the American/Canadian spelling tha
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=aluminum%2Caluminium&year_start=1830&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false
Re: (Score:2)
Like there arent silent letters or ridiculous pronunciations in British English as well.
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"Worcestershire" has entered the conversation.
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That's not just silent letters but an entire silent syllable, like Leicestershire.
Cholmondeley has two silent syllables as well as other silent letters, Featherstonehaugh goes even further and moves letters to a different place for pronouncing.
Re: (Score:2)
TIL: English used to have "plumming" to indicate water pipes.
Then some eggheads at Oxford decided that the Latin had a 'b' so English should have a 'b' and only low-brow morons didn't know that so the OED was changed.
So today we still have 'plumbing' because of some dipshits in the 17th Century.
"Trust the Experts".
Re: (Score:2)
> About grammer...
Or, clearly, how to spell "grammar" either. ;)
Re: (Score:1)
That's not grammar, that's pronunciation. An example of a grammatical error would be your failure to capitalize "Americans".
But if that's the fight you want to pick, let's talk about the rhoticity of your r's, you presumably-British-person. Or rather, the lack thereof.
Re: A shame (Score:1)
You need a semicolonoscopy to rid you of the urge to collate.
Top of the Muffin to You! (Score:2)
Top of the Muffin to You!
I've largely stopped using semicolons (Score:2)
lest some idiot think I'm emoticonically winking at them, especially when one appears after a closing parenthesis (for example); which could appear to said idiot as a winkie-frownie, even though it's oriented the wrong way (some idiots orient their emoticons the wrong way).
Re: (Score:2)
> (some idiots orient their emoticons the wrong way)
Congrats on living up to your nickname. When we BBSers were inventing emoticons, we turned some of them backwards because it was amusing to us. You don't get to tell us how they are supposed to work.
Re: (Score:2)
> 3 to 1.. looks like he does. grow up.
3 to 1 what, chance you're a dipshit as well as a coward?
Re: (Score:2)
So, we can call you the 'Al Gore of emoticons'.
Those evolved into emojis; now we have someone to blame!
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> we turned some of them backwards because it was amusing to us. You don't get to tell us how they are supposed to work.
Thanks for confirming that emoticons do indeed have have a correct orientation.
> Congrats on living up to your nickname.
I may be a cunt, but at least I'm not a twit. (-;
Pppshah (Score:3)
You’d think with the supposed rise in ADD; and ADHD, and the general lack of attention spans; there would be a rise in semicolon use.
Re: (Score:2)
I think semicolons cut in the other direction. They do technically allow you to ramble at greater length before hitting a period; but they impose more structural complexity you need to think about.
From my mercifully brief encounters with the unhelpful parts of reddit the true ADHD-addled text structure is essentially a faithful transcription of a moron telling a story about something interesting only to them: A relentless torrent of short sentences without the mercy of paragraphs. Just a solid square of
Re: (Score:2)
> From my mercifully brief encounters with the unhelpful parts of reddit the true ADHD-addled text structure is essentially a faithful transcription of a moron telling a story about something interesting only to them: A relentless torrent of short sentences without the mercy of paragraphs...
It would seem that you and I have similar writing styles. We have at least one disagreement though: for me, capitalizing the first word after a colon - unless it's a proper noun or an acronym - constitutes a thud upon my eyeballs.
Re: Pppshah (Score:2)
A series of short sentences would be a wonder for my ADHD addled brain. At least for me, the greater problem is that I tend to produce sentences as long as the entire paragraph and forget to put any punctuation in it at all, leading the reader to run out of breath 63 times per sentence.
Re: (Score:2)
> They do technically allow you to ramble at greater length before hitting a period; but they impose more structural complexity you need to think about.
The conjunction "but" makes the semicolon unnecessary, since it is grammatical with a comma.
Re: Pppshah (Score:2)
Rise in ADHD *diagnoses*. The people with it were there all along, struggling through life getting beaten at school, and fired from jobs. You know, just like there wasnâ(TM)t a âoerise in left handed peopleâ 50-100 years ago.
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Just like there's no autism "epidemic". It's just being noticed now.
Re: (Score:2)
> Rise in ADHD *diagnoses*. The people with it were there all along, struggling through life getting beaten at school, and fired from jobs. You know, just like there wasnâ(TM)t a âoerise in left handed peopleâ 50-100 years ago.
Tendencies like this are a spectrum, so of course there have always been some ADHD folks. Indeed, we were probably the dominant human cognition mode 20,000 years ago when ADHD would have been essential for kill-or-be-killed survival. Slow, focused, docile thoughts are for grazing ruminant herd animals like cows and accountants.
However, I believe it is highly likely that the recent pervasiveness of ADHD among young (and some older) folks results from the widespread unbalancing of the electrochemical state of
Re: (Score:2)
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder and is highly genetic. You're born with it and you die with it.
Well, of course (Score:3)
They have to use all those semicolons in Java code, not to mention C and other languages. It'd make sense that they'd start running out.
Re: (Score:2)
Funny, I immediately thought of Perl, where a missing semicolon is my #1 typo mistake.
Definitely use semicolons! (Score:5, Insightful)
I love semicolons; how else would I legitimize what would otherwise be run-on sentences?
Definitely use semicolons! Or dashes. (Score:3)
> I love semicolons; how else would I legitimize what would otherwise be run-on sentences?
Dash.
I love the dash-- how else would I legitimize what would otherwise be a run-on sentence?
Re: (Score:2)
> Dash.
> I love the dash-- how else would I legitimize what would otherwise be a run-on sentence?
These days that will get you tagged as AI.
TL;DR (Score:2)
You say: fewer people are using semicolons. Ok.
Semicolon usage: up in C++, down in python (Score:2)
My semicolon usage generally seems to vary with the language I am writing in. In C++, there seem to be quite a few. In python, very few. In Rust, somewhere in between. English is just a python-derived language.
As a literature/writing nerd... (Score:2)
...I'm not sure how I feel about semicolons.
George Orwell once wrote a letter to a friend where he said that in his new novel, he was proud of the fact that he hadn't used a single semicolon, because he'd decided it was a "completely useless" piece of punctuation. (IIRC the novel was "Coming Up for Air".) Funny thing is, though, there *are* some semicolons in "1984" (which was his last book). Did he change his mind, or just forget about his rule? (He was pretty sick when he wrote 1984 so it could have b
Re: (Score:1)
I like semicolons. I also sometimes like to use a dash (or is it a hyphen?) where a semicolon might apply, as you did between sure and semicolons.
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A dash is not the same as a hyphen. A dash connects phrases; a hyphen connects words.
There could be a whole other story about the loss of the hyphen. I recall reading an article about it decades ago; since then, things have only gotten worse. The article spoke of the ambiguity that results from the lack of a hyphen. For example what is a "high school building?" Is it a building that is a high school ( a high-school building) or a school whose building is high (a high school-building?)
Look around and you can
Re: (Score:2)
> George Orwell once wrote a letter to a friend where he said that in his new novel, he was proud of the fact that he hadn't used a single semicolon, because he'd decided it was a "completely useless" piece of punctuation. (IIRC the novel was "Coming Up for Air".) Funny thing is, though, there *are* some semicolons in "1984" (which was his last book). Did he change his mind, or just forget about his rule? (He was pretty sick when he wrote 1984 so it could have been the latter).
I like Orwell a lot but outside of his issues with political speech (which are quite valid) he had some odd ideas about language. For instance, he had major problems with any words with "foreign" roots in the English language labeling those who used them as guilty of "pretentious diction" [1]https://www.theguardian.com/bo... [theguardian.com] . Never mind this is completely natural and happens in virtually all languages. English would be an awfully boring language if we didn't have them.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/17/my-problem-with-george-orwell
I'm going to publish five books (Score:1)
With nothing but semicolons to screw up the next round of the study.
Re: (Score:1)
I think that a delightfully funny thing about such a book would be that it could also be read by a compiler, which would come up with the same result as a human reader would. Nothing!
AI will change that (Score:1)
This is fun but If you want to correct a text in an AI model, it usually uses semicolons all the time. So people will stop using them, but the proofreading AI will reinstate them.
Now how am I going to terminate my statements! (Score:2)
Am I going to have to switch to begin-end?
What I do is (Score:2)
Just use a comma for everything,
Are they ignoring the grammar checkers? (Score:1)
If I use a comma in this text box when I should have used a semicolon, it gets marked and I fix it. Am I the only one who leaves their grammar checker on?
I'd also like to point out that The Guardian ceased to be a journalistic outlet and became a propaganda outlet when they declared that their opinions were facts.
I'm already scaling back (Score:2)
I've stopped putting a semicolon at the end of code inside Begin..End blocks in all my Pascal programs.
Clarity, that's why you use them! (Score:2)
Generally, there is no need to use a semicolon, in 99% of cases, a comma will work just as well, without issue. However, if you're writing policy documentation, contracts, licensing, or, you have to be exceptionally clear, don't use a comma, use a semicolon, where you can swap them. The use of a semicolon removes any possible doubt in the relation of phrasing and structure. Outside of policy documentation, contracts, licensing and when I'm annoyed at the grotesque lack of literacy skill with others, I re
In American schools most... (Score:2)
English grammar isn't even taught. Fewer and fewer people read or write anything besides email or chat. Basic literacy and arithmetic is about all we can try for today. Forget music,foreign languages, science, and the semi-colon, they're off the table at this point.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah that was my first thought- a general loss of complexity and subtlety in the English language.
Pray that you don't get a semicolon (Score:2)
I hope to never have a semicolon as the result of a colostomy
Obligatory (Score:4, Informative)
[1]https://theoatmeal.com/comics/... [theoatmeal.com]
[1] https://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
For all intensive purposes the semicolon is becoming obsolete. This begs the question, why, but to me it infers that punctuation is not taught so well. I could care less and it does not peak my interest in the slightest.
Re: Obligatory (Score:2, Funny)
"For all intents and purposes."
Looks like you haven't been to colleague either.
Re: Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that you only caught one error here is hilarious.
Re: (Score:2)
The fact that you only caught one error here is hilarious.
I do not think that was the case: he was continuing the joke. Try rereading it carefully.
Re: (Score:2)
> "For all intents and purposes."
> Looks like you haven't been to colleague either.
Hard to see humor on the internet sometimes, I agree, but all of the other subtle Engish errors should have clued you.
(Kudos on the phrase "Looks like you haven't been to colleague", though!)
Re: (Score:2)
woosh
Re: (Score:3)
Dammit; his colleague turned my woosh back on me!
It's so funny. (Score:2)
Snarkily pointing out others' mistakes (and adding a bit of insult) is SUCH a popular activity on Slashdot that we have posts that bait people into doing this responded-to by posts that appear to be doing this only to further bait similar responses, just to try to trick posters into making mistakes that we can all point at and laugh.
I'm guilty too. Slashdot can really bring out our pettiness.
Re: (Score:2)
My best and worst experiences learning English were with an Oxford trained professor, and a high school English Teacher. From the professor, I learned:
1. Make the book easy to read.
2. Chose terminology carefully. Particularly for new concepts, short clear terms make things much easier for the reader.
3. Choose a system of punctuation, and stick to it throughout the book.
On the other hand, my high school English teacher insisted I get a special style guide / book on how to use the semicolon. From this I
Re: (Score:2)
I appreciate your work... but I don't want to.
Re: (Score:2)
Or this one from The Lonely Island: [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M94ii6MVilw