Semicolons are becoming increasingly rare; their . . . In 1781, British literature featured a semicolon roughly every 90 words; by 2000, it had fallen to one every 205 words semicolon use in English rose by 388% between 1800 and 2006, before
Semicolon Usage in British Literature Drops Nearly 50% Since . . . Semicolon usage in British literature has declined from once every 205 words in 2000 to once every 390 words today, representing a nearly 50% drop, according to analysis commissioned by language learning company Babbel The punctuation mark appeared once every 90 words in British literature from 1781, making the current frequency the lowest on
Semicolon Usage Declines by Nearly Half in English Writing . . . Research commissioned by Babbel reveals a 47% decline in semicolon usage in English-language books since 2000, with a slight recovery of 27% between 2017 and 2022 Lisa McLendon’s study found that 67% of British students rarely or never use semicolons, and over half cannot apply them correctly
The words we use | OUPblog - blog. oup. com At this point in time is of course weightier than now or at present, and utilize eclipses the modest monosyllabic use Language changes, and the avant-garde variety always sounds like an abomination to the cultured group When all pedants die out, the “progressives” begin to guard their norm, which has now become conservative!
Coherent oscillations in word-use data from 1700 to 2008 Data preparation We used the 2012 version of the Google Ngram database for 1-grams, consisting of word frequency counts per year in the interval 1520–2008 (Google Inc , 2013) For English, our
Historical use of since in place of ago | WordReference . . . Since 'ago' is natural in those instances, I've passed them over without noticing the disparity Interesting that uses of 'since' tend to be in speech I'm wondering again if this was a class thing It would also be interesting to know the last well-known occurence in literature of 'since' as used in this way