I have kept this history short, and I have kept it to what I am sure of. A great deal has been written about punctuation, and not all of it is true; a society devoted to a mark of precision ought to be precise about its past.

Before the printers

The oldest books in Greek and Latin were written by hand, often with the words run together and with little punctuation or none. A reader was expected to find the pauses for himself, usually by reading aloud. Over the centuries scribes added marks of various kinds to help, but those marks differed from place to place and from one copyist to the next. There was no single system; there was only custom.

Venice, in the 1490s

The semicolon as we know it comes to us from the early printers of Italy, and above all from one of them. Aldus Manutius was a scholar who became a printer in Venice in the last decade of the fifteenth century. His press printed the Greek and Latin classics with great care, and it is remembered for several good ideas: small books that a person could carry, and a slanting typeface we now call italic.

Aldus was among the first to print the semicolon. The account most often given is that it appears in a short book by the young scholar Pietro Bembo, describing his visit to Mount Etna, which Aldus printed in the middle of that decade. I have never seen the book itself, and I do not expect to; but I like to think of a printer in Venice deciding that the world needed a pause longer than a comma and gentler than a stop, and cutting a piece of metal to provide one.

The name explains itself. In those days the colon was thought of as a longer pause than it is today, and the semicolon was half of one. It sat between the comma and the colon, and it still does.

Across Europe

Books printed in Venice traveled, and the printers who admired them copied their habits. Over the century that followed, the semicolon made its way across Europe and into English books, where it has lived ever since. Its duties changed somewhat over the years, and writers of every age have used it more or less freely according to their taste; but the two duties described on our main page are the ones that have lasted.

Three curiosities

In Greek, the same mark that we call a semicolon serves as the question mark. A Greek reader who sees it at the end of a sentence knows that a question has been asked. I find this charming; it suggests that the mark has always been about thinking twice.

On the typewriter, the semicolon sits on the home row, under the right little finger. I learned to type in 1934, and I have always believed that a key placed where the hand already rests was meant to be used.

In computing, I am told, the semicolon is in no danger at all. My granddaughter's husband writes computer programs, and he tells me that the languages he works in end nearly every line with one. I asked him whether the computer insists that they be used correctly. He said it insists absolutely, and will not run the program otherwise. I have asked him whether the computer would consider teaching.

A personal history

I met the semicolon in the tenth grade, in 1932, in the classroom of Miss Constance McMurtry, who was twenty-four years old and the finest teacher I ever had. She wrote a sentence on the blackboard about my own family, which had just moved across town: Esther's family has a new house; Esther has a new school. She asked us why there was a semicolon in the middle and not a period. Nobody knew. She told us that a period would have made the two halves strangers, and a comma would have made them a mess; the semicolon made them neighbors. I decided that afternoon to become an English teacher, and I did.

My husband, Walter, was not a man for punctuation. He wrote to me from the Army for nearly four years during the war, and his letters were full of love and nearly empty of commas. In all those letters there is exactly one semicolon. He used it correctly. I have kept that letter in my Bible for fifty-five years, and I will tell you what it says when you are a member of very long standing.

I tell these stories so that you will understand why a woman of eighty-two would start a society for a punctuation mark. The semicolon has been good to me. It seemed only fair to return the favor.

Esther Hernandez
San Antonio, Texas