How many punctuation marks are there

They were very friendly and invited us to their villa in Portugal. Footballers these days earn more money but they are fitter and play many more matches. It was an expensive hotel in the centre of Stockholm, but we decided it was worth the money. When a subordinate clause comes before the main clause, we commonly use a comma to separate the clauses. However, we do not always do this in short sentences:.

When we use subordinate or non-finite comment clauses to give further details or more information, we commonly use commas to separate the clauses:. We use commas to mark non-defining clauses. Such clauses normally add extra, non-essential information about the noun or noun phrase:. The ambulance, which arrived after just five minutes, took three people to the hospital immediately. The storm, lasting as it did for several days, caused serious damage to villages near the coast.

Barcelona was the Spanish city that was selected for the Olympic Games. We also usually separate vocatives, discourse markers and interjections with commas:. Open the door for them, Kayleigh , can you. Well , what do you think we should do about it? Wow , that sounds really exciting. When the direct speech is first, we use a comma before the closing of the quotation marks:.

Reported speech. There are three main reasons for the success of the government: economic, social and political. We commonly use a colon between sentences when the second sentence explains or justifies the first sentence:.

Try to keep your flat clean and tidy : it will sell more easily. We use semi-colons instead of full stops to separate two main clauses. In such cases, the clauses are related in meaning but are separated grammatically:. Spanish is spoken throughout South America; in Brazil the main language is Portuguese. Semi-colons are not commonly used in contemporary English. Full stops and commas are more common. In direct speech, we enclose what is said within a pair of single or double quotation marks, although single quotation marks are becoming more common.

Direct speech begins with a capital letter and can be preceded by a comma or a colon:. We can put the reporting clause in three different positions. Note the position of commas and full stops here:. When we use direct speech inside direct speech, we use either single quotation marks inside double quotation marks, or double quotation marks inside single quotation marks:.

We commonly use question marks inside the quotation marks unless the question is part of the reporting clause:. We also use single quotation marks to draw attention to a word. We can use quotation marks in this way when we want to question the exact meaning of the word:. We sometimes use quotation marks to refer to the titles of books, newspapers, magazines, films, songs, poems, videos, CDs, etc:.

Articles or chapters within books, or titles of short stories, are normally punctuated by single quotation marks:. Dashes are more common in informal writing. They can be used in similar ways to commas or semi-colons. Both single and multiple dashes may be used:. No one could believe it! Just wanted to thank you for a lovely evening — we really enjoyed it. Brackets have a similar function to dashes.

They often add extra, non-essential information:. Heaton gives a convincing explanation of how hurricanes are formed pages 27— You can find the figures you need on www. We use full stops in dates. Forward slashes or dashes are also commonly used:. Date of birth: 1. In American English the day and the month are in a different order so that 8 January is written as follows:.

When we speak email and web addresses, we say each word separately. To avoid confusion, we sometimes spell out each letter of a word:. Outsets and onsets! Punctuation: capital letters B, D and full stops. See also: Noun phrases. Punctuation: question marks? See also: Exclamative clauses. Separating clauses with commas. Commas and relative clauses. Not: … the Spanish city, that was selected ….

See also: Clauses. Commas and speech forms. See also: Reported speech. Punctuation: colons : and semi-colons ;. Punctuation: dashes — and other punctuation marks. Spoken English:. To avoid confusion, we sometimes spell out each letter of a word: Hannah.

X decimal point 2. See also: Punctuation Spelling. Popular searches 01 Other , others , the other or another? Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. Image credits. Word of the Day goodwill.

Blog Outsets and onsets! Read More. November 08, To top. Adjectives and adverbs Adjectives and adverbs Easily confused words Nouns, pronouns and determiners Prepositions and particles Using English Verbs Words, sentences and clauses Adjectives and adverbs Easily confused words Nouns, pronouns and determiners Easily confused words Nouns, pronouns and determiners Prepositions and particles Using English Verbs Words, sentences and clauses Prepositions and particles Using English Verbs Words, sentences and clauses.

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Click on the arrows to change the translation direction. Follow us. Choose a dictionary. Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English. Usage explanations of natural written and spoken English. Grammar Thesaurus. Word Lists. Choose your language. Adjectives Adjectives: forms Adjectives: order Adjective phrases: functions Adjective phrases: position Adjectives and adjective phrases: typical errors.

Comparison: adjectives bigger , biggest , more interesting Comparison: clauses bigger than we had imagined Comparison: comparisons of equality as tall as his father As … as. Adverbs Adverb phrases Adverbs and adverb phrases: position Adverbs and adverb phrases: typical errors Adverbs: forms Adverbs: functions Adverbs: types Comparison: adverbs worse, more easily Fairly Intensifiers very, at all Largely Much , a lot , lots , a good deal : adverbs Pretty Quite Rather Really Scarcely Very.

Usage: It separates two complete sentences that are closely related in thought. These are two separate statements. Here the semicolon removes the distance between the two statements. My favourite example is from the movie Zoolander. In other words, we recognise him for his acting, first.

When should you use a hyphen? That needs its own article! Often when English gets a new word it is hyphenated, and over time it loses the hyphen. So e-mail becomes email, and ice-cream becomes ice cream. Usage: There are two kinds of dashes — the en dash and the em dash. There are 4 types of brackets.

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.

Punctuation marks are distinguished as well as from logographs, which are simply one-glyph representations of lexical items e. This article will consider only punctuation marks that appear separately from other written glyphs and have no lexicalreference. 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. 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. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How many punctuation marks are there?

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