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Semi-colons are in decline, studies suggest

  • proofreadersteve
  • May 20
  • 1 min read

According to a study by the language software Babbel, usage of semi-colons in English language books has roughly halved in the last 25 years. In the study, the semi-colon appears once every 390 words in 2025, compared with once every 205 at the millennium. My first thought is that the frequency of semi-colons is still higher than I would have imagined. However, it is not too surprising that semi-colons are declining, in an age when grammar in general is arguably also going steadily downhill.


Another study undertaken after the Babbel one by Lisa McLendon, found more than half of British students don't know when a semi-colon should be used instead of a comma or colon. A survey of the London student network, 67% said they rarely or never included a semi-colon in their writing, and only 11% said they were frequent users. Anecdotally, semi-colons are often incorrectly used in place of commas, effectively as a sentence pause. As many reading this will already know, they are correctly used to join together two sentences which could exist independently from each other. I still see them in news articles and in fiction and non-fiction books, but my gut feeling is that the next quarter century will see a further decline for the semi-colon, as society becomes ever more dominated by digital media.






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