Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use comma in a sentence

33 example sentences · noun, verb

Comma means the punctuation mark ⟨,⟩ used to indicate a set of parts of a sentence or between elements of a list. Example: “The new editor can gum up your article with too many commas.”

Examples of comma by meaning

nounAny of various nymphalid butterflies of the genus Polygonia, having a comma-shaped white mark on the underwings...

  • Other members of this genus that are frequently encountered in the park are the eastern comma (P. comma) and question mark (P. interrogationis).2013, Ann Simpson, Rob Simpson, “Butterflies and Moths”, in Nature Guide to Shenandoah National Park (Falcon Pocket Guide), Guilford...

More sentences with comma

  • The new editor can gum up your article with too many commas.From the entry gum
  • My editor is very finicky about punctuation. Every dot and comma has to be just right.From the entry finicky
  • A comma-delimited file has commas as the delimiter, separating each field of the file.From the entry delimiter
  • He was a sloppy punctuator, often leaving out commas and confusing colons with semicolons.From the entry punctuator
  • Data items in the computer file were delimited by commas.From the entry delimit
  • Don't take it personally if your editor imposes the Oxford comma — it's merely an aspect of house style.From the entry house style
  • In English, the vocative may be indicated by an addressee–address separation comma, or by the particle O, as in "What is the matter, sir?", "Mother, listen!", or "O Lord".From the entry vocative
  • Just last week, she’d had to fix the Shatner commas in one of his briefs.2025 June 3, Renée Ahdieh, “Firebreather”, in Park Avenue: A Novel, New York, N.Y.: Flatiron Books, →ISBN. From the entry Shatner comma
  • Should the Royal Mint have used an Oxford comma on its Brexit 50p piece?2020 January 27, Alison Flood, “Philip Pullman calls for boycott of Brexit 50p coin over 'missing' Oxford comma”, in The Guardian. From the entry Oxford comma
  • There are, however, occasional bouts of genuine hospitality, with no strings or inverted commas attached.2004, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Pete Grant, Blowing the Blues: Fifty Years Playing the British Blues, page 122. From the entry facility trip
  • That "yes", surrounded by commas, implies a question or doubt in the mind of the speaker.2004 June 13, John Hatpin, “Tributes for Raygun”, in alt.fan.cecil-adams (Usenet), archived from the original on 07 Dec 2025. From the entry pondian
  • It was Collins who invented the ‘Oxford comma’, for which he obtained supported from Herbert Spencer.2002 [1978], Peter Sutcliffe, “Making the Press what it ought to be”, in The Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, page 114. From the entry Oxford comma
  • Ok.. try this.. your commas, quotation marks, plus marks, etc are all messed up.2002 May 2, Mike Flynn, “[PHP-WIN] window.open and php...”, in php.windows (Usenet), retrieved 15 Aug 2022. From the entry plus mark
  • The raised point (·) may signify English comma, semicolon, or colon.2001, James M. Efird, A Grammar for New Testament Greek, Wipf & Stock Publishers, page 5. From the entry raised point
  • The values listed for fontstyle are combined using the comma as a delineator: BOLD, ULINE.1998, James Hay, Reference MWAPI, page 156. From the entry delineator
  • Do not try to fix a squinting modifier by inserting a comma to make your readers pause.1998, Jill Meryl Levy, Take Command of Your Writing, →ISBN, page 228. From the entry squinting modifier
  • The dragons' heads no longer exist, but the positions of the tongues are indicated by commas.1991, Alain Thote, “The Double Coffin of Leigudun Tomb No. 1: Iconographic Sources and Related Problems”, in Thomas Lawton, editor…. From the entry Pingqiao
  • “Thanks, for, coming, here.” He spoke not with the Standard comma, the Oxford comma, the Walken comma, or the Shatner comma.2021 November 12, Axel Gearman, “Day One”, in Two Ways Out of Stockton, →ISBN. From the entry Shatner comma
  • Boomerspeak's canonical features include the dot dot dot, repeated commas, and the period at the end of a text message.2019 December 20, Gretchen McCulloch, “’Boomerspeak’ Is Now Available for Your Parodying Pleasure”, in Wired, San Francisco, Calif.: Condé…. From the entry boomerspeak
  • Avoid putting a comma immediately after any of the FANBOYS.2011 November 24, Larry Beason, Mark Lester, A Commonsense Guide to Grammar and Usage, 6th edition, Macmillan, →ISBN, →OL, page 192. From the entry fanboys
  • These FANBOYS help create compound sentences, and when they serve this role, a comma comes before their use.2009 September 24, Mel Friedman, Rena Grasso, Carol Hunter, Laura Meiselman, The Best Test Preparation for the PRAXIS II ParaPro…. From the entry fanboys
  • Because they feel that sentences must be punctuated, students have a tendency to insert commas randomly through sentences.1985, Mamie Atkins, Instructor's Manual, Prentice Hall Handbook for Writers, Prentice Hall, →ISBN, page 68. From the entry overpunctuate
  • We give sufficient conditions to obtain left determined model structures on a full reflective subcategory, on a full coreflective subcategory and on a comma category.2015, Philippe Gaucher, “About left determined model categories”, in arXiv. From the entry coreflective
  • The use of the middle point eventually died out, its place having been taken by the comma starting about the ninth century.2012, Nancy Pardee, The Genre and Development of the Didache: A Text-linguistic Analysis, Mohr Siebeck, page 81. From the entry high point
  • Gertrude Stein, who might, in her time, have been considered a bit of a bossyboots herself, suggested that semicolons were simply commas with pretensions.2008, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. From the entry bossyboots
  • The student must determine from the context which is correct. (In most printed Greek texts, however, modern editors have put commas into the text.2001, James M. Efird, A Grammar for New Testament Greek, Wipf & Stock Publishers, page 5. From the entry raised point
  • And then, with a hug and a look which admonished and encouraged all at once, she slipped away, her white nightdress trailing behind her in a long comma.2010, Sara Donati, Into the Wilderness, page 278. From the entry sec'tary
  • The words "jot" and "tittle" in this passage refer to diacritic marks, that is, dashes, dots, or commas added to a letter to accentuate the pronunciation.1965, P. A. Marijnen, The Encyclopedia of the Bible. From the entry tittle
  • A shorter division of a periodus was a comma, and the pause to catch the breath after a comma was sometimes shown in writing by a middle dot ⸳.1963, David Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law, Little, Brown and Company. From the entry middle dot
  • Delimited files and spreadsheets compartmentalize data by separating each piece of info with a comma or a tab, or by cubbyholing them into columns and rows in a spreadsheet file.2013, Bonnie Biafore, QuickBooks 2014: The Missing Manual, O’Reilly. From the entry cubbyhole
  • Just as important is the pen's ability to dawdle in midstroke, fattening the curve of a y, for example, while pondering whether to follow up with a comma or not.2012 October 23, Edmund Morris, This Living Hand: And Other Essays, Random House Publishing Group, page 93. From the entry fatten the curve
  • To convert spesmiloj and spesoj readily into pence, divide by 4, disregarding the third figure to the right of the comma or decimal point (which figure is not always written).1918, Maurice Hyde, “The International Money Unit”, in The Esperanto Guide: A Complete Manual of the International Language for…. From the entry speso

Meaning of comma

  1. noun The punctuation mark ⟨,⟩ used to indicate a set of parts of a sentence or between elements of a list.
  2. noun A similar-looking subscript diacritical mark.
  3. noun Any of various nymphalid butterflies of the genus Polygonia, having a comma-shaped white mark on the underwings, especially Polygonia c-album and Polygonia c-aureum of North Africa, Europe, and Asia.

Full definition of comma

Questions about comma in a sentence

How do you use comma in a sentence?
Comma is used as a noun and verb. For example: “The new editor can gum up your article with too many commas.”
What is a short sentence with comma?
“Avoid putting a comma immediately after any of the FANBOYS.”
What does comma mean?
Comma means the punctuation mark ⟨,⟩ used to indicate a set of parts of a sentence or between elements of a list.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: comma (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use comma in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/comma. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.