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Babbel's April 2025 Semicolon Survey looked at students' reactions to the obvious secular decline in semicolon frequency:

The semicolon once stood as a symbol of thoughtful, elegant writing, a punctuation mark beloved by literary greats like Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. But today, the humble semicolon faces an uncertain future.

New analysis from Babbel uncovers a stark decline: semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades. In fact, historical data shows this decline stretches back centuries. In 1781, British literature featured a semicolon roughly every 90 words; by 2000, it had fallen to one every 205 words. Today, there’s just one semicolon for every 390 words.

And it’s not just in books. New survey data from Babbel reveals over half (54%) of UK students didn’t know when to replace a comma with a semicolon.

Babbel partnered with the London Student Network, a community of 500,000 students, to ask about their attitudes toward the semicolon and whether they actually knew how to use it. The quiz, co-written by Babbel’s linguistic experts and grammarian Lisa McLendon, tested students on real-world semicolon usage.

• • Based upon responses to the interactive quiz, 28% of young Britons don’t use the semicolon at all. 39% of students claim to rarely use semicolons; just 11% of respondents described themselves as frequent users of the semicolon.
  • Over half (54%) of young Britons don’t know the rules around semicolon usage (4 of the 5 most poorly-answered questions required respondents to identify when to replace a comma with a semicolon). UK students scored 49% on average on the semicolon quiz.
  • Although many don’t understand or use it, the Babbel survey revealed that 67% of young Britons still believe the semicolon has value.

There was a strong media reaction, as Babbel no doubt expected. And of course the reactions were mixed — thus Amelia Hill ("Marked decline in semicolons in English books, study suggests", The Guardian 5/18/2025) leads with a strongly negative quotation:

“Do not use semicolons,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut, who averaged fewer than 30 a novel (about one every 10 pages). “All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

…and ends with a strongly positive one:

Perhaps, therefore, it will not be Vonnegart [sic] who wins out in the battle of the semicolon, but the rash, witty, louche Camille Desmoulins, as recreated by Hilary Mantel.

In her novel A Place Of Greater Safety, Mantel imagined the politician, writer and best-known journalist of the French revolution having no doubts about it at all: “I wonder why I ever bothered with sex,” she quotes him as saying. ‘There’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.’”

Hill omits the sexual aspects of Vonnegut's remark, which opens the chapter "Here is a Lesson in Creative Writing" from his memoir-ish work A Man Without a Country:

Here is a lesson in creative writing.

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I’m kidding.

For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I’m kidding.

We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I’m kidding.

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Presumably Vonnegut calls semicolons "hermaphrodites" because they're half commas and half colons — but why and how are they "transvestite"?

None of the coverage seems to have quoted my favorite semicolon commentary, from Ursula K. Le Guin's essay "Introducing Myself", reprinted in her collection The Wave in the Mind:

What it comes down to, I guess, is that I am just not manly. Like Ernest Hemingway was manly. The beard and the guns and the wives and the little short sentences. I do try. I have this sort of beardoid thing that keeps trying to grow, nine or ten hairs on my chin, sometimes even more; but what do I do with the hairs? I tweak them out. Would a man do that? Men don’t tweak. Men shave. Anyhow white men shave, being hairy, and I have even less choice about being white or not than I do about being a man or not. I am white whether I like being white or not. The doctors can do nothing for me. But I do my best not to be white, I guess, under the circumstances, since I don’t shave. I tweak. But it doesn’t mean anything because I don’t really have a real beard that amounts to anything. And I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”

In various earlier LLOG posts, and in my presentation "Historical trends in English sentence length and syntactic complexity" for SHEL12, I've pointed out that Hemingway's reputation for "little short sentences" is a widely-repeated but false stereotype — the distribution of sentence lengths in in Le Guin’s essay collection The Wave in the Mind is almost identical to the distribution in Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast:

But Le Guin is right about the semicolons:

Source	Semicolons	Total Characters	per 100k
The Wave in the Mind	411	520,607	78.95
A Moveable Feast	58	319,654	18.14

Update — FWIW, Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle has 38.39 semicolons per 100k characters… And Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety weighs in at 93.72.

The secular trend:

Some relevant past posts:

"Homo hemingwayensis", 1/9/2005
"Death before syntax?", 10/20/2014
"The wave in the mind", 4/1/2018
"Lexical display rates in novels", 4/18/2020
"Trends", 3/27/2022
"Embedding depth", 11/28/2022
"Comma/Period ratios", 1/6/2025

June 8, 2025 @ 9:20 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and gender, Orthography

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