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How many punctuation marks are there?

English Language & Usage Asked by pobig43001 on April 21, 2021

Most websites say that there are 14 punctuation marks, for example ‘Punctuation Marks in English Grammar‘ or ‘What Are the 14 Punctuation Marks in English Grammar?

However, I feel like there are more punctuation marks, for instance ‘How to use punctuation marks‘. This website shows 16 punctuation marks?

Which one is right? Which one should I trust? How many punctuation marks are there?

2 Answers

There is no standard list of punctuation marks. They are designed by and for printers, not writers, and every publisher has their own set of punctuation marks, and a style manual for their use. It's been this way since printing was invented, and has never stabilized, even in (or perhaps especially in) English. So don't bother counting; somebody else could count different.

As I put it in this encyclopedia article,

Punctuation refers to various systems of dots (Lat punctus) and other marks that accompany letters and other glyphs as part of a writing system. Although there is a certain overlap among the various kinds of markings, punctuation proper should be distinguished from diacritic marks, which are intended as modifications of individual letters (e.g, ö ő å í è ç š ơ ū ñ ṇ) and are often simply considered to be part of the letter they appear on, like the dot on the Latin lower-case i. Punctuation marks are distinguished as well as from logographs, which are simply one-glyph representations of lexical items (e.g, @ # $ % &).

Several other common glyphs, like the slash indicating alternation (and/or), or asterisk ‘ * ’ indicating some special qualification like a footnote or ungrammaticality, are intermediate between these categories, but are not considered true punctuation. This article will consider only punctuation marks that appear separately from other written glyphs and have no lexicalreference.

The modern suite of punctuation marks includes the period ‘.’, comma ‘ , ’, colon ‘ : ’, semicolon ‘ ; ’, left and right parentheses ‘ ( ) ’ (and other brackets, square ‘ [ ] ’, angle ‘ < > ’, and curly ‘ { } ’), interrogation and exclamation marks ‘ ? ! ’ (bracketed with their inverses ‘ ¿ ¡ ’ in Spanish), dashes of several lengths ‘ - – — ’, single and double quotation marks ‘ “ « » ” ’, and the apostrophe, or raised comma “ ” (not to be confused with the prime mark ‘ ’, which is a diacritic).

Correct answer by John Lawler on April 21, 2021

So the fourteen are "period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, semicolon, colon, dash, hyphen, parentheses, brackets, braces, apostrophe, quotation marks, and ellipsis" — it's interesting that both your sources list them in the same order — and the list of sixteen separates single-quotes from double-quotes and adds the asterisk.

Your first reference says "it is Punctuation [sic] actually which transforms our words into standard and correct structure-syntax or sentences", and by that norm, the asterisk is not a punctuation mark. It's a reference marker. The third reference doesn't actually explain why they include the asterisk, anyway.

If you're going to count the asterisk as punctuation, then you have to include all such marks, like the dagger †, double-dagger ‡, and various paragraph marks which can be used (§ and ¶). You might even include counted references like ¹, ², ³; and I've even seen a double vertical bar ‖ and a crossed double vertical bar. But those marks don't have anything to do with correct structure and syntax.

I would go so far as to group parentheses and brackets, since they have the same function; to group single- and double-quotes, since they have the same function too; to leave out braces which have no function (but if they do, then it's purely parenthetical like brackets); and to leave out anything which does not contribute to sentence structure and syntax, like the asterisk.

So my list would be period, question mark, exclamation mark, comma, semicolon, colon, dash, hyphen, parenthetical marks, apostrophe, quotation marks, and ellipsis. That's twelve.

Answered by Andrew Leach on April 21, 2021

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