Last year, Gawker ranked punctuation marks. This week, BuzzFeed Books ranked punctuation marks. Let’s look at how our respective rankings stack up.

Ranking Gawker (2013) BuzzFeed (2014) Δ
1 period exclamation mark ↑
2 space em dash ↑
3 exclamation point period ↓
4 semicolon hyphen ↑
5 em dash ellipsis ↑
6 double quotation marks question mark ↑
7 apostrophe parenthesis ↑
8 question mark comma ↑
9 comma semicolon ↓
10 hyphen colon ↑
11 colon en dash ↑
12 en dash quotation mark ↓
13 open parenthesis apostrophe ↓
14 ellipsis NO ENTRY
15 close parenthesis NO ENTRY
16 single quotation marks NO ENTRY
17 close bracket NO ENTRY
18 open bracket NO ENTRY

Note: BuzzFeed did not rank the space, close bracket, open bracket, or single quotation marks; combined the open and closed parentheses into one ranking; and referred to the exclamation point as an exclamation mark, which according to BuzzFeed “is the best mark—simply because to feel is to be human.”