Unpunctuated

Unpunctuated is an adjective used to describe writing that lacks punctuation marks such as periods, commas, question marks, and other symbols that indicate sentence boundaries and grammar. Text described as unpunctuated may appear as a continuous string of words, a line without clear separators, or phrases set apart only by spaces or line breaks. The term is commonly applied when discussing historical manuscripts, informal notes, or stylistic choices where punctuation is omitted.

Historically, many scripts did not use punctuation. In ancient Greek and Latin, scriptio continua presented words in a continuous flow, requiring readers to infer boundaries from context. Over time, scribes and printers developed punctuation conventions, but the systems varied by region and era. In modern contexts, unpunctuated text can still be found in casual online messaging, certain design experiments, or poetic or artistic writing where punctuation is purposefully minimized.

In contemporary technology and linguistics, unpunctuated text presents both challenges and opportunities. Readability declines as readers must rely on context to parse meaning, especially in longer passages. In natural language processing, punctuation restoration is a common task: models learn from punctuated corpora to reinsert sentence boundaries, commas, and other marks into transcriptions or streams of text that lack them. The ability to restore punctuation improves intelligibility for readers and enhances downstream processing for search, translation, and voice interfaces, while recognizing that some contexts intentionally eschew punctuation for stylistic reasons.