In the 3rd century B.C. Aristophanes of Byzantium invented a system of single dots that separated verses and indicated the amount of breath needed to read each fragment of text aloud. The different lengths were signified by a dot at the bottom, middle, or top of the line. For a short passage (a komma), a dot was placed mid-level. The name came to be used for the mark itself instead of the clause it separated. The mark used today is descended from a diagonal slash, or virgula suspensiva (the slash), used from the 13th to 17th centuries to represent a pause, mainly by Aldus Manutius. In the 16th century, the virgule dropped to the bottom of the line and curved, turning into the shape we know.

Aldus Manutius used the semicolon to indicate interdependent statements. General use of the semicolon in English began in 1591; Ben Jonson was the first English writer to use it systematically.

The ampersand is a corruption of “and (&) per se and,” which literally means “(the character) & by itself (is the word) and.” The symbol (or glyph) & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin (and French) word for “and.” One of the first examples of an ampersand appears on a piece of papyrus from about 45 A.D. Written in an early Roman capital cursive (the handwriting of the time), it shows the ligature ET. A sample of Pompeian graffiti from 79 A.D. also shows a combination of the capitals E and T, and is again written in early Roman script. The ampersand is generally interchangeable with and. This is why ‘etc.’ can sometimes be seen written as ‘&c.’