🌅 The Death of the Semicolon

SOURCE

Babbel

WHAT TO KNOW

• Like many controversial things, the once-mighty semicolon has persisted through decades of ignorance, change, and debate, resulting in the famed punctuation now being less popular than ever. An analysis by language learning platform Babbel quantifies the loss, finding semicolon usage in British English has declined by 50% over the past two decades, capping off a literary death some three centuries in the making.

WHY IT MATTERS

• In 1781, British English used a semicolon once every 90 words; by 2000, usage had fallen to once every 205 words. Today, a semicolon now appears just once every 390 words. The Google Books Ngram Viewer database, which surveys novels and nonfiction, appears to show more of a fluctuation in semicolon usage over the past 20 years, however, it still appears there’s been a steep decline overall.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• The decline likely has a straightforward explanation: people don’t know how to use a semicolon. A survey commissioned by Babbel of roughly 500,000 students in the London Student Network found 54% of respondents said they didn’t know when to properly replace a comma with a semicolon, while the average score on a quiz testing the students’ semicolon knowledge was just 49%. Only 11% of students in the survey described themselves as “frequent users” of semicolons (British for “nerds”).