Aristophanes of Byzantium, head of the Great Library of Alexandria in the 2nd century B.C., is considered by scholars to be the inventor of punctuation. Aristophanes created a scheme for notating texts that that included a proto-period, proto-comma, and proto-semicolon.
Aristophanes: this new recount of our “punctuation contest”:http://emdashes.com/2010/07/so-you-love-punctuation-write.php, to win Ben Greenman’s new book, _What He’s Poised to Do_, is for you.
We have received many wonderful, creative, funny, sad, and inspiring letters. Ellipsis remains the leader with 16 letters of love… People love it a lot. Semicolon follows close behind with 12; semicolon is second but not secondary. The exclamation point is third!
**The current high rankings:**
Ellipsis: 16
Semicolon: 12
Exclamation Point: 9
Apostrophe: 8
Comma: 7
Period/Full stop: 7
Question Mark: 5
Quotation Marks: 5
Ampersand: 4
Asterisk: 4
Parentheses: 4
At sign: 3
Colon: 3
Interrobang: 3
Tilde: 3
Grawlixes: 3
Em dash: 2
Manicule: 2
En Dash: 2
Copyright symbol: 2
Hyphen: 2
All punctuation marks: 2
Number sign: 2
Brackets: 2
**From the “At Least I Got One Letter Department”**:
accent aigu, air quotes, at-the-price-of, bullet, caret, curly quotes, dieresis, dollar sign, exclaquestion mark, interpunct, macron, obelisk (dagger), Oxford comma, percent sign, pilcrow, pound sign, smart quotes, snark, space, underline.
**From the “No One Loves Me Department”**:
asterism, backslash, degree, ditto mark, double hyphen, inverted exclamation point, guillemets, lozenge, the “therefore” and “because” signs, slash, solidus, tie, prime, registered trademark, section sign, service mark, sound recording copyright symbol, trademark, underscore/understrike, vertical bar, pipe, tee, falsum, index/fist, lozenge.