Dictionary

underpunctuation en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (US) audio

Etymology

From under- + punctuation.

Meanings

1. (uncountable) Insufficient punctuation.
   • The book is enlivened by wry comments (“The East India Company’s commissions implied social inferiority, as they were obtainable by merit only, and not, like the more coveted Queen’s commissions, by purchase”). but it is marred by a Southern Rhodesian system of under[-]punctuation and an almost gloating anti-French bias. 1961 June 14, J. C. W., “Blunder in Crimea”, in The Richmond News Leader, Richmond, Va., page 13:
   • Do you approve this punctuation? Inspect the punctuation of the whole composition. On the whole, is it good? Does the writer err on the side of underpunctuation or overpunctuation? 1939, W[alter] W[ilbur] Hatfield, Senior English Activities, Boston, Mass.; Atlanta, Ga.; Dallas, Tex.; San Francisco, Calif.: American Book Company, page 277:
   • Main trouble with “The House We Used to Haunt” and “The Wizzard One” is each other. Kids are cute, but somehow five pages of underpunctuation, pseudo-naïve sentence structure, and well-calculated grammatical errors are less than cute. 1953 October 29, Miriam Dressler, “Terrific, At Least! Columbia “Jester” Combines Sarcasm And Sex; Shows Humor, Not Subtlety”, in Barnard Bulletin, page 2:
   • Overpunctuation is just as bad as underpunctuation. Therefore if you either omit a needed mark or insert a mark that is not needed, the sentence is wrong. 1933, J[acob] C[loyd] Tressler, M[arguerite] B[lack] Shelmadine, Junior English in Action, book three, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.; Chicago, Ill.: D. C. Heath and Company, page 120:
   • Underpunctuation is common practice in the legal genre (Duff 1995: 1109). The following two examples are both more than 40 characters in length and contain no punctuation. 2020, Clara Ho-yan Chan, “Challenges in legal translation: a language perspective”, in Legal Translation and Bilingual Law Drafting in Hong Kong: Challenges and Interactions in Chinese Regions, Routledge, section 2 (Europeanisation of legal Chinese), subsection 1 (Legislation), subsubsection 2 (Syntax), subsubsubsection iii (Underpunctuation), page 35:
   • The trend of good writing is toward underpunctuation. Or, rather, if writing needs an array of marks, like an assortment of golf clubs, it is a sign that the writer’s method is becoming too involved. 1911 May 11, “The Comma”, in The Daily Missoulian, volume XXXVIII, number 6, Missoula, Mont., page 4:

Forms

Antonyms

overpunctuation

Relateds

underpunctuate