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I wanted to ask a question about the use of commas when separating two items in a list.

I was reading an article in Reuters concerning two different banks listed in the headline:

Deutsche bank, Rabobank hit with EU antitrust charge over bond cartel.

I tend to see this quite frequently in online press where two nouns e.g. two named banks are separated by only a comma. Often, this confuses me as I would assume the correct version of the headline would be one of:

Deutsche bank and Rabobank hit with EU antitrust charge over bond cartel.

or

Deutsche bank & Rabobank hit with EU antitrust charge over bond cartel.

However, I can't find any grammatical reason for why a comma is valid to separate just two items in a list. From my knowledge, we normally use a connecting punctuation such as an ampersand or a proposition e.g. 'and'.

Why do some articles use commas to separate just two items in a list?

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    In headlines, * and * or even * & * take up too much space, hence the comma instead.
    – Tinfoil Hat
    Commented Dec 11, 2022 at 3:55
  • 2
    See this.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Dec 11, 2022 at 8:20
  • My intuition is that this is simply because people can do whatever they want with language, and if enough people do it with enough clout, then the rest of us nod our heads and continue on as if nothing is amiss.
    – Pound Hash
    Commented Dec 17, 2022 at 19:30

1 Answer 1

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This is a case of "headlinese" (see Wikipedia). Headlines often break the normal rules of English grammar in order to be more concise. As that Wikipedia article states, in such headlines

The conjunction "and" is often replaced by a comma, as in "Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap".

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