Why We Must Save the Semicolon From Extinction

The utility of this much maligned punctuation mark in contemporary prose has been called into question.

- Roslyn Petelin

A recent study has found a 50 per cent decline in the use of semicolons over the last two decades. The decline accelerates a long-term trend: In 1781, British literature featured a semicolon roughly every 90 words; by 2000, it had fallen to one every 205 words. Today, there is just one semicolon for every 390 words.

Further research reported that 67 per cent of British students never or rarely use a semicolon; more than 50 per cent did not know how to use it. Just 11 per cent of respondents described themselves as frequent users.

These findings may not be definitive. According to The Guardian, the Google Books Ngram Viewer database, which surveys novels and non-fiction, indicates that semicolon use in English rose by 388 per cent between 1800 and 2006, before falling by 45 per cent over the next 11 years. In 2017, however, it started a gradual recovery, with a 27 per cent rise by 2022.

Yet when you put the punctuation mark itself into the database, rather than the word "semicolon", you get a quite different result—one that looks very much like a steady decline.

VIRULENT DETRACTORS

The semicolon first appeared in 1494, so it has been around for a long time. So have arguments about it.