Riot Headline Book Riot’s 2025 Read Harder Challenge
Humor

25+ of the Best Grammar Puns

Ashley Holstrom

Staff Writer

Ashley Holstrom helps make books at Sourcebooks. She lives near Chicago with her cat named after Hemingway and her bookshelves organized by color. Newsletter: Crooked Reads. Twitter: @alholstrom.

You know what I love? Grammar puns. They’re the best and they make me laugh every time, even when I’ve seen the same ones over and over again because people know I love grammar and puns. Today, I’ve collected some of the very best grammar puns to make you cackle like a witch and then groan and cover your face in shame.


Past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

Practice safe text: use commas.

Knock knock. Who’s there? To. To who? No, to whom.

I avoid cliches like the plague.

Seven days without a pun makes one weak.

You can’t run through a campground. You can only ran, because it’s past tents.

What’s the difference between cats and a comma? Cats have claws at the end of their paws and commas are a pause at the end of a clause.

Bad spelling makes me [sic].

What did the period say to the sentence? We better stop now!

Do you comma here often?

Grammar: The difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.

What dinosaur knows a lot of synonyms? A thesaurus.

I’m so adjective, I verb noun.

Double negatives are a big no-no.

Synonym rolls: just like grammar used to make.

Every time you make a typo, the errorists win.

What do you call Santa’s little helpers? Subordinate clauses.

The passive voice is to be avoided.

Why shouldn’t you date apostrophes? They’re too possessive.

Writers have great climaxes.

How do you comfort a grammar snob? “There, their, they’re.”

Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They drink. They leave.

Why did the run-on sentence think it was pregnant? Its period was late.

Metaphors be with you.

I before e, except when you run a feisty heist on a weird beige foreign neighbor.

Why do words and punctuation end up in court? To be sentenced.

What do you get when you cross a joke and a rhetorical question?

The comma sutra makes grammar sexy.


Can’t get enough of the pun life? We got you covered (heh) with 70+ book puns, the definitive ranking of punctuation, and the classics as Pokémon.