Serial Comma

The Oxford comma is the comma that goes before the final “and” in a series. For example, if I write “snorts, howls, and guffaws,” if I put a comma after “howls” and before the word “and,” that’s an Oxford comma.

Who called it the ‘Oxford comma’?

It’s also called the serial comma or, rarely, the series comma or the Harvard comma, but the name Oxford comma seems to be the most popular, and it gets that name because it’s the style used by the influential Oxford University Press.

The name “Oxford comma” is newer than you might think though. The Oxford English Dictionary shows the first printed use of the term in 1978, although it’s likely it had already been used among editors for at least a few years before then because the example is from an informal history of the Oxford University Press and is talking about the origin of the comma rule. In fact, I found what I believe is an example from 1974 in the Google Books database, although I wasn’t able to see the whole thing. 

By contrast, I found references to the phrase “serial comma” from as far back as 1935 and “series comma” from as far back as 1919.

Who invented the serial comma?

The first style book to...

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