Frequency of English Punctuation Marks

Frequencies for English Punctuation Marks

Vivian Cook Spelling stats Punctuation site

Based on a writing system corpus some 459 thousand words long. This includes three novels of different types (276 thousand words), selections of articles from two newspapers (55 thousand), one bureaucratic report (94 thousand), and assorted academic papers on language topics (34 thousand). More information is in Cook, V.J. (2013) ‘Standard punctuation and the punctuation of the street’ in M. Pawlak and L. Aronin (eds.), Essential Topics in Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism, Springer International Publishing Switzerland (2013), 267-290

Score per 1000 running words
	Average
. full stop	65.3
, comma	61.6
; semi-colon	3.2
: colon	3.4
! exclamation	3.3
? question	5.6
’ apostrophe/ single quotation	24.3
“ double quotation	26.7
- hyphen	15.3
TOTAL	208.7
score = divided by total words in 1000s, .05 rounded up

Frequency per 1000 words (bold) in various text types

Pick
wick

Sons & Lovers

Myste
rious

Death world

Guard
ian

NY
Times

CEFR

Ling Papers

Ave
rage

COCA

Total words

296,000

161,000

57,106

58,095

11,940

12,084

93,808

33,726

19,364

65.4

14,515

90.1

4,650

81.6

4,783

82.5

522

43.5

760

63.3

4644

49.4

2,269

66.7

65.3

21,304,861

32,618

110.2

12,492

77.6

4,282

75.1

2,420

41.7

570

47.5

776

64.7

4810

51.2

2,258

66.4

61.6

23,849,941

;

3,469

11.1

697

4.3

1.4

0.1

356

3.8

106

3.1

3.2

782,692

144

0.5

273

1.7

132

2.3

0.1

3.6

3.4

552

5.9

321

9.4

3.4

1,360,298

1,527

5.2

1,973

12.3

413

7.2

1.3

0.3

0.1

3.3

368,622

1,897

6.4

1,335

8.3

838

14.7

314

5.4

1.1

0.5

809

8.6

0.0

5.6

1,620,720

’

24,688

83.4

4,259

26.5

1,104

19.4

1,225

21.1

175

14.6

175

14.6

384

4.1

362

10.6

24.3

953,027

“

1,560

5.3

10,430

64.8

4,437

77.8

2105

36.3

271

22.6

262

21.9

239

2.5

1.3

26.7

8,297

28.0

3,109

11.9

1,457

25.6

1006

17.3

133

11.1

154

12.8

1081

11.5

420

12.4

15.3

392,700

Total per 1000

315.5

297.5

305.1

205.8

145

182.2

186.5

236.7

208.7

Source: same corpus, compared with COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American)

Punctuation Mark Percentages
Source: Meyer (1987)'s analysis of the Brown Corpus

Commas	47%
Full stops	45%
Dashes	2%
Parentheses	2%
Semicolons	2%
Question marks	1%
Colons	1%
Exclamation marks	1%

Frequencies as Google N-grams
NB commas are missing as Ngrams uses them as dividers


Frequencies for comma distribution
Elements in a series (words, phrases, clauses etc)	20.3%
Sentence-initial elements (words, phrases, clauses etc)	20.2%
Sentence-final elements (phrases, clauses)	5.0%
Non-restrictive phrases or clauses	17.3%
Appositives	26.1%
Interrupters	6.6%
Quotations	4.5%
Source: Bayraktar et al, 1998 based on Wall Street Journal