Colon (punctuation)The colon, , is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots aligned vertically. A colon often precedes an explanation, a list, or a quoted sentence. It is also used between hours and minutes in time, between certain elements in medical journal citations, between chapter and verse in Bible citations, and, in the US, for salutations in business letters and other formal letter writing. In Ancient Greek, in rhetoric and prosody, the term κῶλον (kôlon, 'limb, member of a body') did not refer to punctuation, but to a member or section of a complete thought or passage; see also Colon (rhetoric).
Writing systemA writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form of information storage and transfer. Writing systems require shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script.
InterpunctAn interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. (Word-separating spaces did not appear until some time between 600 and 800 CE.) It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages and is present in Unicode as . The multiplication dot (Unicode ) is frequently used in mathematical and scientific notation, and it may differ in appearance from the interpunct.
HyphenThe hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. Son-in-law is an example of a hyphenated word. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash and em dash and others), which are longer, or with the minus sign , which is also longer and usually higher up to match the crossbar in the plus sign . As an orthographic concept, the hyphen is a single entity.
SemicolonThe semicolon or semi-colon is a symbol commonly used as orthographic punctuation. In the English language, a semicolon is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought, such as when restating the preceding idea with a different expression. When a semicolon joins two or more ideas in one sentence, those ideas are then given equal rank. Semicolons can also be used in place of commas to separate items in a list, particularly when the elements of the list themselves have embedded commas.
LogogramIn a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph (from Greek logo, "word", and gramma "that which is drawn or written") is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced Hànzì in Mandarin Chinese, Kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, Hán tự in Vietnamese and Sawgun in Standard Zhuang) are generally logograms, as are many hieroglyphic and cuneiform characters. The use of logograms in writing is called logography, and a writing system that is based on logograms is called a logography or logographic system.
Quotation markQuotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to set off direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character. Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media. The single quotation mark is traced to Ancient Greek practice, adopted and adapted by monastic copyists. Isidore of Seville, in his seventh century encyclopedia, Etymologiae, described their use of the Greek diplé (a chevron): [13] ⟩ Diple.
Full stopThe full stop (Commonwealth English), period (North American English), or full point is a punctuation mark. It is used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence (as distinguished from a question or exclamation). This sentence-ending use, alone, defines the strictest sense of full stop. Although full stop technically applies only when the mark is used to end a sentence, the distinction – drawn since at least 1897 – is not maintained by all modern style guides and dictionaries.
CommaThe comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark () in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical. Other fonts give it the appearance of a miniature filled-in figure on the baseline.
ApostropheThe apostrophe ( or ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: The marking of the omission of one or more letters, e.g. the contraction of "do not" to "don't". The marking of possessive case of nouns (as in "the eagle's feathers", "in one month's time", "the twins' coats"). It is also used in a few distinctive cases for the marking of plurals, e.g. "p's and q's" or Oakland A's.
DashThe dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the en dash , generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the em dash , longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontal bar , whose length varies across typefaces but tends to be between those of the en and em dashes.
Calendar dateA calendar date is a reference to a particular day represented within a calendar system. The calendar date allows the specific day to be identified. The number of days between two dates may be calculated. For example, "25 " is ten days after "15 ". The date of a particular event depends on the observed time zone. For example, the air attack on Pearl Harbor that began at 7:48 a.m. Hawaiian time on 7 December 1941 took place at 3:18 a.m. Japan Standard Time, 8 December in Japan.
PalaeographyPalaeography (UK) or paleography (US; ultimately from , palaiós, "old", and , gráphein, "to write") is the study of historic writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, including the analysis of historic handwriting. It is concerned with the forms and processes of writing; not the textual content of documents. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.
UnicodeUnicode, formally The Unicode Standard, is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, which is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, defines as of the current version (15.0) 149,186 characters covering 161 modern and historic scripts, as well as symbols, thousands of emoji (including in colours), and non-visual control and formatting codes.
Letter caseLetter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally majuscule) and smaller lowercase (or more formally minuscule) in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size (e.g. {C,c} or {S,s}), but for others the shapes are different (e.
EmoticonAn emoticon (əˈmoʊtəkɒn, , rarely ɪˈmɒtɪkɒn, ), short for "emotion icon", is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a person's feelings, mood, or reaction, without needing to describe it in detail. The first ASCII emoticons are generally credited to computer scientist Scott Fahlman, who proposed what came to be known as "smileys" - :-) and :-( - in a message on the bulletin board system (BBS) of Carnegie Mellon University in 1982.
WordA word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition.
TypographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing (leading), and letter-spacing (tracking), as well as adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning). The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process.
Slash (punctuation)The slash is the oblique slanting line punctuation mark . Also known as a stroke, a solidus, a forward slash or several other historical or technical names including oblique and virgule. Once used to mark periods and commas, the slash is now used to represent division and fractions, exclusive 'or' and inclusive 'or', and as a date separator. A slash in the reverse direction is known as a backslash. Slashes may be found in early writing as a variant form of dashes, vertical strokes, etc.
Romance languagesThe Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are numerous modern languages that evolved from Late Latin and its spoken form, often called Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages branch of the Indo-European language family. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are Spanish (489 million), Portuguese (283 million), French (80 million), Italian (67 million) and Romanian (24 million), which are all national languages of their respective countries of origin.
