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Information about Punctuation

“Punctuating” redirects here. For other uses, see Punctuating (disambiguation).


Punctuation is everything in written language other than the actual letters or numbers, including punctuation marks (listed at right), inter-word spaces, capitalization, and indentation.[1]

Punctuation marks are symbols that correspond to neither phonemes (sounds) of a language nor to lexemes (words and phrases), but which serve to indicate the structure and organization of writing, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading it aloud. See orthography.

In English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences. For example, "woman, without her man, is nothing," and "woman: without her, man is nothing," have greatly different meanings, as do "eats shoots and leaves" and "eats, shoots and leaves."[2]

The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register and time, and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic and are thus the author's (or editor's) choice. Tachygraphic language forms, such as those used in online chat and text messages, may have wildly different rules.

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Punctuation
apostrophe ( ’ ' )
brackets ( ), [ ], { }, < >
colon ( : )
comma ( , )
dashes ( ‒, –, —, ― )
ellipsis ( …, ... )
exclamation mark ( ! )
full stop/period ( . )
guillemets ( ' ' )
hyphen ( -, ‐ )
question mark ( ? )
quotation marks ( ‘ ’, “ ” )
semicolon ( ; )
slash/stroke ( / )
solidus ( ∕ )
Interword separation
spaces ( ) ( ) ( )
interpunct ( )
General typography
ampersand ( & )
asterisk ( * )
at ( @ )
backslash ( \ )
bullet ( • )
caret ( ^ )
currency ( ) , $, €, , , ₩, ₪
dagger/obelisk ( † ) ( ‡ )
degree ( )
dele ( )
emoticons (☻ )
inverted exclamation point ( )
inverted question mark ( )
number sign ( # )
numero sign ( № )
percent and related signs
( %, ‰, ‱ )
pilcrow ( )
prime ( ′ )
section sign ( )
tilde/swung dash ( ~ )
umlaut/diaeresis ( )
underscore/understrike ( _ )
vertical/pipe/broken bar ( |, )
Uncommon typography
asterism ( ⁂ )
index/fist ( ☞ )
therefore sign ( ∴ )
lozenge ( ◊ )
heart ( ♥ )
interrobang ( ‽ )
irony mark ( ؟ )
reference mark ( ※ )
sarcasm mark

History

The earliest writing had no capitalization, no spaces and no punctuation marks. This worked as long as the subject matter was restricted to a limited range of topics (for example, writing was initially used for recording business transactions). Expanding the use of writing to more abstract concepts required some way to disambiguate meanings. Until the eighteenth century, punctuation was principally an aid to reading aloud; after that time its development was as a mechanism for ensuring that the text made sense when read silently.[1]

The oldest document that uses punctuation is the Mesha Stele (9th century BC). This employs points between the words and horizontal strokes between the sense section as punctuation.

The Greeks were using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots - usually two (c.f. the modern colon) or three - in around the fifth century BC. Greek playwrights (e.g. Euripides and Aristophanes) used symbols to distinguish the ends of phrases in written drama: this essentially helped the play's cast to know when to pause. In particular, they used three different symbols to divide speeches, known as commas (indicated by a centred dot), colons (indicated by a dot on the base line), and periods (indicated by a raised dot).

The Romans (circa 1st century BC) also adopted symbols to indicate pauses.

Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of the Christian Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud and the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation, various punctuation marks and an early version of initial capitals. St Jerome and his colleagues, who produced the Vulgate translation of the Bible into Latin, developed an early system (circa 400 AD); this was considerably improved on by Alcuin. The marks included the virgule (forward slash) and dots in different locations; the dots were centred in the line, raised or in groups.

The use of punctuation was not standardized until after the invention of printing. Credit for introducing a standard system is generally given to Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They popularized the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop, invented the semicolon, made occasional use of parentheses, and created the modern comma by lowering the virgule.[2]

Other languages

Other European languages use much the same punctuation as English. The similarity is so strong that the few variations confuse a naïve English reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French, quotes would appear as: « Je suis fatigué. » (in French, each "double ponctuation", as the Guillemet, requires a Non-breaking space). In Greek, the question mark is written as a sign resembling the English semi-colon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (·), known as the ano teleia (άνω τελεία).

Arabic — written from right to left — uses a reversed question mark: ؟.

Originally Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 1600s, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written in the Devanagari script, started using the vertical bar (|) to end a line of a prose and double vertical bars (||) to end the verse.

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean did not use punctuation before the modern era. The grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context. Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they often look different and have different customary rules. :Further information: East Asian Punctuation

Ethiopian languages, including Amharic, Tigrinya, Ge'ez, and Afaan Oromo, make use of these punctuation marks: space (፡), comma (፣), sentence end (።), semicolon (፤), colon (፥), preface colon (፦), question mark (፧), paragraph separator (፨).

Novel punctuation marks

A European patent application was filed, and published in 1992 under WO number WO9219458,[3] for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma". As of 2006 no patent has been issued for them, though.

Unicode

Apart from the ASCII punctuation marks in its Basic Latin range
!"'()*,-./:;<>?[\]`Unicode has the General Punctuation (U+2000–206F) and Supplemental Punctuation (U+E000–E0FF) ranges.
General Punctuation
Unicode.org chart (PDF)
U+ 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
2000           ​‌‍‎‏
2010‐‑‒–—―‖‗‘’‚‛“”„‟
2020†‡•‣․‥…‧

‪‫‬‭‮ 
2030‰‱′″‴‵‶‷‸‹›※‼‽‾‿
2040⁀⁁⁂⁃⁄⁅⁆⁇⁈⁉⁊⁋⁌⁍⁎⁏
2050⁐⁑⁒⁓⁔⁕⁖⁗⁘⁙⁚⁛⁜⁝⁞ 
2060⁠⁡⁢⁣⁤⁥⁦⁧⁨⁩


Supplemental Punctuation
Unicode.org chart (PDF)
U+ 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
E000⸀⸁⸂⸃⸄⸅⸆⸇⸈⸉⸊⸋⸌⸍⸎⸏
E010⸐⸑⸒⸓⸔⸕⸖⸗⸘⸙⸚⸛⸜⸝⸞⸟
E020⸠⸡⸢⸣⸤⸥⸦⸧⸨⸩⸪⸫⸬⸭⸮ⸯ

See also

References

Further reading

External links

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
Z?
Yhistory • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters
Punctuating may refer to
  • Punctuation, in written language
  • A method of cheating in poker with marked cards

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Symbols are objects, characters, or other concrete representations of ideas, concepts, or other abstractions. For example, in the United States, Canada and Great Britain, a red octagon is a symbol for the traffic sign meaning "STOP".
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phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes meaning. Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but abstractions of them. An example of a phoneme would be the /t/ found in words like tip,
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See Language (journal) for the linguistics journal.


A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon.
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A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of words that are different forms of the same word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running
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Not to be confused with inflection.


In linguistics, intonation is the variation of pitch when speaking. Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody.
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The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. (Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography.
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In geography, location is a position or point in physical space that something occupies on Earths' surface. A real location can often be designated using a specific pairing of latitude and longitude, a Cartesian coordinate grid (e.g.
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For the phonological term, see .
In linguistics, a register is a subset of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting.
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time.

One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and time itself is something that can be measured.
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Shorthand is an abbreviated, symbolic writing method that improves speed of writing or brevity as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is stenography, from the Greek stenos (narrow, close) and
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weasel words.
* It does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by citing reliable sources.
* It may require general cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
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Text messaging, or texting is the common term for the sending of "short" (160 characters or fewer) text messages, using the Short Message Service, from mobile phones.
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apostrophe ( ’  or  ' ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages written in the Latin alphabet.
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Brackets are punctuation marks used in pairs to set apart or interject text within other text. With respect to computer science, the term is sometimes said to only strictly apply to the square or box type.
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colon (“:”) is a punctuation mark, consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line.

Punctuation

Usage

As with many other punctuation marks, the usage of colon varies among languages and, for a given language, among
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For other uses, see Comma.
A comma ( , ) is a punctuation mark. 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.
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A dash is a punctuation mark. It is longer than a hyphen and is used differently.

Common dashes

There are several forms of dash, of which the most common are:
  glyph Unicode[1] HTML[2] HTML/XML[3]
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Ellipsis (plural ellipses; from Greek ἔλλειψις 'omission') in printing and writing refers to the row of three full stops (… or . . .
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exclamation mark or exclamation point is a punctuation mark: ! It is usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume, and generally marks the end of a sentence.
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Full Stop is an album released in 2000 by Annabelle Chvostek.

Track listing

  1. "Icy blue"
  2. "Messages get through"
  3. "Body Work"
  4. "Gray's Pussycat Edie"
  5. "Chills"
  6. "Blows me away"
  7. "La La La"
  8. "Booby Boo"
  9. "That in itself"

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Guillemets, also called angle quotes, are line segments, pointed as if arrows (« or »), sometimes forming a complementary set of punctuation marks used as a form of quotation mark.
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hyphen ( ‐ ) is a punctuation mark. It is used both to join words and to separate syllables. It is often confused with the dashes ( –, —, ― ), which are longer and have different functions.
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question mark (?), also known as an interrogation point, question point, query,[1] or eroteme, is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence.
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Quotation marks or inverted commas (also informally quotes,[1] and occasionally speech marks) are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech, a quotation, a phrase or a word.
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A semicolon (  ;  ) is a punctuation mark. The Italian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder established the practice of using the mark to separate words opposed in meaning and to mark off interdependent statements.
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Due to technical limitations, /. redirects here. You may be looking for Slashdot, the technology news web site.
A slash or stroke, /, is a punctuation mark.
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The solidus character U+2044, ⁄, also known as a shilling mark, is a punctuation mark; it is not found on standard keyboards.

The solidus is similar to the slash, a character found on standard keyboards.
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This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject.
Please help recruit one or [ improve this article] yourself. See the talk page for details.
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In writing, a space ( ) is any empty (non-written) zone between written sections. However, the term is usually used to refer to an empty zone used for interword separation (interword space) or separation between punctuation and words.
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