Programming Symbols: Names, Meanings, and How Often Each Appears in Code

1. The Most Common Symbols in Code

We counted every character in 1,350 snippets of real code across nine languages. Here are the fifteen symbols that turn up most, with each bracket pair counted together.

Parentheses are in a league of their own because nearly every line of code calls a function, and every call opens and closes one. Curly braces come second because they open and close every block in the C family. The semicolon, equals sign and colon follow, each roughly once every 50 to 60 characters.

2. What Are Brackets, Braces and Parentheses Called?

These four pairs cause most of the naming confusion, partly because American and British English disagree about what brackets means.

Parentheses ( )

Also called parens, and round brackets in British English. They call and define functions, group expressions, and wrap conditions in C-family languages. In Python they also make tuples.

Square brackets [ ]

In American usage, these are what brackets usually means. They write arrays and lists, index into them (items[0]), and in Rust wrap attributes such as #[derive(Debug)].

Curly braces { }

Usually just braces; British English often says curly brackets. They open and close blocks in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP and Rust, write objects in JavaScript and dictionaries in Python, and mark placeholders in Python f-strings.

Angle brackets < >

Called angle brackets or chevrons when they come as a pair, and less-than and greater-than when they compare. They wrap generic types such as Map<String, Integer>, every HTML tag, and the second half of arrows like => and ->. In HTML they are the two most common characters of all.

3. Every Programming Symbol: Names and Uses

All 32 symbols on a US keyboard, most common first. Per 1,000 is how often each appears in our code sample; pairs count both halves. Shift says whether you need it on a US layout.

4. Which Symbols Each Language Leans On

Parentheses top almost every list, but the next places show each language's personality. Figures are occurrences per 1,000 non-space characters, with bracket pairs counted together.

PHP's dollar sign is on every variable. C++ lives on colons because of std:: and other scopes. HTML is mostly angle brackets and quotes. For how much harder these make each language to type overall, see our ranking of the hardest programming languages to type.

5. Symbol Names That Cause Confusion

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  # is hash or pound. Americans say pound sign, from the abbreviation for pounds of weight. Elsewhere it is the hash, and in the UK the pound sign means £. Number sign and octothorpe are also correct.

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  . is period, full stop or dot. In prose it ends a sentence; in code everyone says dot, as in dot notation.

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  / and \ are different keys. The forward slash is in URLs, Unix paths, division and comments. The backslash starts escape sequences like \n and separates Windows paths.

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  ' and ` are different keys too. The apostrophe or single quote sits next to Enter; the backtick sits under Esc. JavaScript treats them differently.

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  The minus key is really hyphen-minus. Typography distinguishes hyphens, dashes and the true minus sign, but code uses only this one ASCII character for all of them.

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  ^ is not a power. In C, Java, JavaScript and Python the caret is bitwise XOR, so 2 ^ 3 is 1, not 8. Python and JavaScript use ** for powers.

6. Why Symbols Slow You Down

Knowing a symbol's name is the easy part; typing it fast is harder. 61.9% of symbol keystrokes in our sample need Shift, and most symbols sit at the edges of the keyboard: the right pinky column and the number row. Ordinary typing courses barely train either, because English prose rarely needs them.

That is why programmers who type prose quickly often slow down on code. Our guide to special characters covers the techniques, and the symbols track drills these keys directly.

7. Method

We counted every character in 1,350 code snippets from TurboType's nine language tracks: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C, C++, PHP, Rust and HTML & CSS, 150 each, 207,306 non-space characters in total. We left out the symbol-drill track, which is symbol-heavy by design. Frequencies are per 1,000 non-space characters. Shift is for a US QWERTY keyboard. Our other posts that include spaces and the drill track report smaller percentages because they divide by a larger total.

8. Frequently Asked Questions