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I want to write a sentence with three city/county pairs. I normally use a comma between a city/country like so:

I live in Sydney, Australia.

But what is proper when describing three places? I want to separate the city/country with a comma and then another comma between each pair, but it looks wrong.

I have lived in Sydney, Australia, Tokyo, Japan and Paris, France.

Laurel
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Brent
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1 Answers1

19

You could use a comma to separate the cities from the countries, and a semicolon to separate the locations. See the example of the semicolon being used as a super-comma given at this The Oatmeal comic:

I have lived in Sydney, Australia; Tokyo, Japan; and Paris, France.

Note that the list ends with "Paris, France". Even if the sentence continues after the list, there should be no further list-related punctuation. For example:

I have lived in Sydney, Australia; Tokyo, Japan; and Paris, France at various times.

Lawrence
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Lyes
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