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Comma   /kˈɑmə/   Listen
Comma

noun
1.
A punctuation mark (,) used to indicate the separation of elements within the grammatical structure of a sentence.
2.
Anglewing butterfly with a comma-shaped mark on the underside of each hind wing.  Synonyms: comma butterfly, Polygonia comma.



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"Comma" Quotes from Famous Books



... over the hedge, blowing fragrant breaths of approval from their wide, comma-shaped nostrils upon the lush grass and upon the short heads of white clover, as they stood face to the brae, all with their heads upward, eating their way like ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... time, perhaps, he understood that discerning placement of the comma does not atone for ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... with him, especially not as regards the marks of punctuation, by means of which he tries to distinguish himself from you, when at the end of the pamphlet he exclaims: "Wagner says, OPERA NOT,—DRAMA; I say OPERA, NOT DRAMA." His "Komala" is better than his comma, and his practice much better than his theory. There is much in it that would please you, and has undoubtedly been originated by "Lohengrin." Sobolewski wrote "Komala" at first in three acts, and had ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... visitor. This time it was a lanky boy, with, a blue bag over his shoulder and a notebook and pencil-stump in his hand. He nodded to the assistant as to an old friend with whom one may be at ease, set down his bag, opened his notebook, and nibbled his stump. Then he read aloud, with a comma or semicolon between each, a dozen or twenty titles. They were the names of the books which his employer wished to pick up. The red-eyed assistant listened, and shook his head. Then the boy, without another word, ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant

... the corrector, beside supplying the stage direction Lay it downe, has added a comma after "hand," substituted a period for the colon after "Art," and a capital for a small w in "wipe." Would a forger do such minute and needless work as this, and do it so carelessly, too, as this one did? for, to make the colon a period, he merely strikes his pen lightly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... his Political Biography of Lord George Bentinck, quotes this passage, and, as it seems to me, manipulates it unfairly, by ending it at the word "decimated," as if there were a full stop there, whereas the sense in the original only requires a comma, and so it is in Hansard. To make the sense terminate at "decimated," he moulds a sentence and a half into one, thus: "The Chief Secretary says, that the ministers did wisely in this decision, but ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... ignition. Filaments were then thrown out downward towards the chromosphere, and finally the usual appearance of a "stemmed prominence" was assumed. Still more remarkable was an observation made by Trouvelot at Harvard College Observatory, June 26, 1874.[603] A gigantic comma-shaped prominence, 82,000 miles high, vanished from before his eyes by a withdrawal of light as sudden as the passage of a flash of lightning. The same observer has frequently witnessed a gradual illumination or ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... is a compressed form that consists of three columns for 'word', 'definition', and 'additional notes'. It is set up with a comma between each item and a hard return at the end of each definition. This means that this section could easily be cut and pasted into its own text file and imported into a database or spreadsheet as a comma ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... etonne de la quantite que je leur en voiois prendre; aussi ils s'y accoutumerent des la jeunesse; le jour d'une bataille ils ne s'oublient pas de doubler la dose; cette drogue les anime ou plutot les enyvre, et les rend insensibles an danger, de sorte quils se jettant dans le combat comma des betes furieuses, ne sachant ce que c'est de fuir ... c'est un plaisir de les voir ainsi avec leur fumee d'opium dans la tete s'entre embrasser quand on est pret de combattre et se dire adieu les uns aux autres, comme gens qui sont resolus de mourir."—Vol. ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... Autobiography" category. As such, every attempt has been made to reproduce it exactly as it was printed and as it won the award. In particular, inconsistent hyphenation of compound words is pervasive in this text and has been retained. Unconventional punctuation—for example using a comma to splice two sentences—has also been ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... 43: Changed period to comma (When he was thirteen years old, his father removed thence to ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas

... Ordnance Corps. A department which deals out supplies to the troops. Its chief asset is the returning of requisitions because a comma is misplaced. ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey

... dark Scriptorium brought, See vellum tomes by Monkish labour wrought; Nor yet the comma born, Papyri see, And uncial letters wizard grammary; View my fifteeners in their rugged line; What ink! what linen! only known long syne— Entering where ALDUS might have fixed his throne, Or Harry Stephens covetted ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... Sorrow, "I don't believe he is nuffin' but a reeblushionary suspensioner (a revolutionary pensioner), but it peers to me dem folks do libb for ebber. My poor old missus used to call 'em King George's hard bargains, yah, yah, yah. But who comma dere, Massa?" said he, pointing to a boat that was rapidly approaching ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... rather pudgier than one would like one's swamis, yogis, seers, and initiates, yet her voice had the real professional note. It was refined and optimistic; it was overpoweringly calm; it flowed on relentlessly, without one comma, till Babbitt was hypnotized. Her favorite word was "always," which she pronounced olllllle-ways. Her principal gesture was a pontifical but thoroughly ladylike ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... at all hours. Even two hours after midnight he sat in the inner room with tired secretaries who marvelled at the physical and mental strength of a man who at that hour could still dictate letters full of important detail without missing a point or a comma; though he came down early in the morning. But he was responsible for the guarding of the Army's store-cupboard—that great hangar, half a mile long—and for the discipline of a town full of soldiers who, without discipline, would make a merry hell of it, and for the orderly ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... at my woe. He says I must remember that you can't slip the Idylls of the King in between the Black-faced Comedian and the Elephant Act. I suppose I must just bear it, grinning if possible, until I have won my footing and then I won't allow so much as a comma to ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... the second stating as the result of this, "that we make trifles of terrors," whereas the tendency would necessarily be to make "terrors of trifles." The confusion arises from the careless pointing of the first sentence. By simply shifting the comma at present after "things," and placing it after "familiar," the discrepancy between the two sentences disappears, as also between the two members of the first sentence, which are now at variance. It should be ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various

... without lips, which Lavater deems an indubitable sign of an evil mind, and it was framed in a pair of slight gray moustaches and a 'royale'—an ornament then in fashion, which somewhat resembled a comma in form. The old man wore a close red cap, a large 'robe-dechambre', and purple silk stockings; he was no less a personage than Armand ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... inflections. The most disagreeable violations of required inflections are raising the voice where it should fall—as at the completion of an idea, and letting it drop where it should remain up—as before the completion of an idea, frequently answering to a comma. Other variations of ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... don't know, you ought to know; you should make it your business to know. If I've got cholera I want to be told what'll cure me. I don't care a hang whether I'm killed by a comma bacillus or——" ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... SIMUL ATQ' CIRONA." [Footnote: The comma in these inscriptions stands for a small cuneiform mark, I believe of contraction, and the small for a zigzag mark of the same kind. The dots or periods are ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin

... to hear and see, when two scribes have been appointed, how at first they praise each other's words, as did Trissotin and Vadius; how gradually each objects to this comma or to that epithet; how from moment to moment their courage will arise,—till at last every word that the other has written is foul nonsense and flat blasphemy;—till Vadius at last will defy his friend in prose and ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope

... Not a single comma. This lack of punctuation, and the misspelling of the word "delighted," the whole letter, and even the long, narrow envelope in which it was put filled my heart with tenderness. In the sprawling but diffident handwriting I recognised Sasha's walk, her way of raising her eyebrows ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... 'but' frequently appears without any punctuation mark before it. At other times it has a comma, a dash, or ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins

... slight confusion in construction. If a comma preceded terrible, souvent would then be regularly dependent on combien. But there is no authority for this punctuation, and we must supply a repeated combien, thus: tu sais combien terrible . . . [il est it combien] ...
— Esther • Jean Racine

... said Rankin without perceiving the satirical note. "Now there's De Maupassant's Fort comma la Mort—quite the most interesting variation—shows the turn a genius can give. There the triangle is the man of middle age, the mother he has loved in his youth and the daughter he comes to love. It forms, you might say, ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... these keys to you as commanding officer. If his Honor has a copy of the EXACT FORM OF WORDS, and will favor the publick with it, we shall be able to judge where the difference is, and whether in our opinion it is MATERIAL. Perhaps the words according to the Charter which I observe are commad in his Honors reply as emphatical, are omitted by Mr. Hall: But if THEY are a part of the FORM OF WORDS, the house seem to have fully taken them up by affirming that his Honor has no authority either BY THE CHARTER or ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams

... containing Flinders' narrative of the expedition to the Furneaux Islands is in the Melbourne Public Library. It is a beautiful manuscript, 22 quarto pages, neat and regular, every letter perfect, every comma and semi-colon in place: a portrait ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... murderers —one in jail, under sentence, receiving gifts of flowers and angel cake from kind ladies, and waiting for the court above to reverse the verdict in his case because the indictment was shy a comma; and the other out on bail, awaiting his time for going through the same procedure. But with the ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... confluence, this great flood of visitors, I haue in this rough worke, shap'd out a man Whom this beneath world doth embrace and hugge With amplest entertainment: My free drift Halts not particularly, but moues it selfe In a wide Sea of wax, no leuell'd malice Infects one comma in the course I hold, But flies an Eagle flight, bold, and forth on, Leauing no ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... you, my pretty maid, for I've been asked too, in a breathless note from Mellicent, with neither beginning nor ending, nor comma nor full stop. If any one else had written in such a state of agitation, I should have thought something thrilling had occurred, but Mellicent is guaranteed to go off her head on the slightest provocation. Probably it is nothing more exciting ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey

... pests throw themselves on their backs, make themselves heavy, and fight against me until their slender legs bend. They are not to be moved from the spot; they find something to hook on to, set their heels against a comma or an unevenness in the paper, or stand immovably still until they themselves think fit to go ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun

... PREFACE. This is from B, and must have been written in '83 or not much later. The punctuation has been exactly followed, except that I have added a comma after the word language in the last line but one of page 5, where the omission seemed ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the nearness of enemy and calamity in this passage. Mr. Masson leaves out the comma after If not, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the sense, and certainly to keep not a little farther apart from ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... A comma was added after banks for consistency. (From the Gulf and the Lakes to the ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones

... though the bar of a comma can hardly keep them apart. In order to give it any decent meaning, a tortuous ellipsis is necessary; to pursue which, gives the reader too much toil. Rejecting the first horse in the team, the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... that this was monstrously absurd. All the time she knew that she did not wish to marry this man. Fine sentences, pompously framed, slowly formed in her mind such as: "This outrage will not go unpunished, comma, and you will suffer for this, comma, ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... Very well, now you understand the letters, I will explain the other little marks you see in this book. They are called stops: there are six different ones, the comma, which is the shortest; the semicolon;—the colon:—the period.—the note of admiration!—which denotes wonder or surprise—and the note of interrogation? which shews that a question is asked. Repeat ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley

... this series, there are a number of instances where the use of the comma in the printed book seems to me inappropriate. However, I have adhered to the punctuation as printed (except for obvious printing errors, ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler



Words linked to "Comma" :   four-footed butterfly, comma bacillus, Polygonia, nymphalid, punctuation, brush-footed butterfly, genus Polygonia, punctuation mark, nymphalid butterfly



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