The History of Punctuation

Punctuation is a fascinating subsection of linguistics, with a rich history! In this article, we'll explain where some of the most common punctuation marks came from.

The Greek librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium (not to be confused with the famous playwright of the same name) was one of the earliest proponents of a system of punctuation. Aristophanes' idea was to use dots to indicate to readers when to pause. He used a dot at the bottom of the line (.), to signify a short pause or komma; a dot near the middle of the line (·), to signify a medium-length pause or kolon; and a dot at the top of the line (·), to signify a full stop or periodos. Are any of these names looking familiar to you?

Jumping ahead to the eighth century, the scholar Alcuin of York took inspiration from Aristophanes' system of dots and invented the punctus interrogativus, later renamed the question mark. The mark looked a bit like a lightning bolt over a dot when it first came into widespread use, but later evolved into the shape we know. Some believe the top part of the mark is meant to look like the letter Q, for the Latin quaestio, meaning "question." Throughout all these centuries, its function has not changed: it signifies that a sentence is a question.

Despite the efforts of these forward-thinking grammarians, most people continued to write without spaces or any kind of punctuation. It wasn't until the Renaissance that the period was revived and used by printers to signify the end of a sentence.

It was at this time that the punctuation movement started to gain momentum. In the late fourteenth century, the Italian poet Iacopo Alpoleio da Urbisaglia created the exclamation point. Its shape was most likely based off of the Latin word "io," which loosely translates to "hooray" in English. The "i" began to be placed above the "o," and this grew into the exclamation point we know and love (or possibly hate — not everyone thinks this mark should exist!).

After the invention of the printing press, dashes became far more widely used. It is unclear by whom they were invented, although they seem to have roots in ancient Greece. Three distinct types of dashes emerged during the Renaissance: the hyphen, en dash, and em dash. Once the typewriter was invented, however, the en and em dashes fell somewhat out of use, as they did not appear on the standard QWERTY keyboard. They still appear in literature, especially the em dash, but an alarmingly large percentage of people have never heard of these punctuation marks.

to be continued