Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences...
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
Aldus Pius Manutius , the Latinised name of Aldo Manuzio —sometimes called Aldus Manutius, the Elder to distinguish him from his grandson, Aldus Manutius, the Younger—was an Italian humanist who became a printer and publisher when he founded the Aldine Press at Venice.His publishing legacy includes...
the Elder established the practice of using the semicolon to separate word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
s of opposed meaning and to indicate interdependent statements. "The first printed semicolon was the work of ... Aldus Manutius
Aldus Manutius
Aldus Pius Manutius , the Latinised name of Aldo Manuzio —sometimes called Aldus Manutius, the Elder to distinguish him from his grandson, Aldus Manutius, the Younger—was an Italian humanist who became a printer and publisher when he founded the Aldine Press at Venice.His publishing legacy includes...
" in 1494. The earliest general use of the semicolon in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
was the first notable English writer to use it systematically. The modern uses of the semicolon relate either to the listing of items or to the linking of related clause
Clause
In grammar, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. In some languages it may be a pair or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in other languages in certain clauses the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase,...
s.
According to the British writer on grammar, Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss is an English writer and journalist, best known for her popular book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.-Early life:...
, many non-writers avoid the colon and semicolon for various reasons: "They are old-fashioned", "They are middle-class", "They are optional", "They are mysteriously connected to pausing", "They are dangerously addictive (vide Virginia Woolf)", and "The difference between them is too negligible to be grasped by the brain of man".
A full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...
The exclamation mark, exclamation point, or bang, or "dembanger" is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume , and often marks the end of a sentence. Example: “Watch out!” The character is encoded in Unicode at...
The question mark , is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence in English and many other languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions...
A comma is a type of punctuation mark . The word comes from the Greek komma , which means something cut off or a short clause.Comma may also refer to:* Comma , a type of interval in music theory...
The colon is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line.-Usage:A colon informs the reader that what follows the mark proves, explains, or lists elements of what preceded the mark....
are normally sentence internal, making them secondary boundary marks. Semicolons are intermediate in strength between terminal marks and commas; their strength is equal to that of the colon.
Constraints
When a semicolon marks the right boundary of a constituent (e.g., a clause or a phrase), the left boundary is marked by punctuation of equal or greater strength.
When two or more semicolons are used within a single construction, all constituents are at the same level, unlike commas which can separate, for example, subordinate clauses from main clauses.
Usage
Semicolons are followed by a lower case letter, unless that letter is the first letter of a proper noun
Proper noun
A proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
. Modern style guides recommend no space before them, and one space after. Modern style guides also typically recommend placing semicolons outside of ending quotation marks—although this was not always the case. For example, the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (1906) recommended placing the semicolon inside ending quotation marks. Applications of the semicolon in English include:
Between items in a series or listing containing internal punctuation
Punctuation
Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences...
, especially parenthetic commas, where the semicolons function as serial comma
Serial comma
The serial comma is the comma used immediately before a coordinating conjunction preceding the final item in a list of three or more items...
s:
She saw three men: Jamie, who came from New Zealand; John, the milkman's son; and George, a gaunt kind of man.
Several fast food restaurants can be found within the cities: London, England; Paris, France; Dublin, Ireland; and Madrid, Spain.
Examples of familiar sequences are: one, two, and three; a, b, and c; and first, second, and third.
(Fig. 8; see also plates in Harley 1941, 1950; Schwab 1947).
An independent clause is a clause that can stand by itself, also known as a simple sentence. An independent clause contains a subject and a predicate; it makes sense by itself....
In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects two words, sentences, phrases or clauses together. A discourse connective is a conjunction joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each...
I went to the basketball court; I was told it was closed for cleaning.
I told Kate she's running for the hills; I wonder if she knew I was joking.
Nothing is true; everything is permitted.
A man chooses; a slave obeys.
I told John that his shoe was untied; he looked.
Between independent clauses and semi clauses linked with a transitional phrase
Transitional phrase
A transitional phrase, in United States patent law, is a phrase that links the preamble of a patent claim to the specific elements set forth in the claim which define what the invention itself actually is...
A conjunctive adverb is an adverb that connects two clauses. Conjunctive adverbs show cause and effect, sequence, contrast, comparison, or other relationships.- Common conjunctive adverbs :*accordingly*additionally*also*anyway*again*as a result...
Everyone knows he is guilty of committing the crime; of course, it will never be proven.
It can occur in both melodic and harmonic lines; however, it is subject to certain restraints.
Of these patients, 6 were not enrolled; thus, the cohort was composed of 141 patients at baseline.
This is the least common use, and is mostly confined to academic texts.
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, the semicolon is called Fāṣila Manqūṭa which means literally "a dotted comma", and is written inverted ( ؛ ). In Arabic, the semicolon has several uses:
It can be used between two phrases, in which the first phrase causes the second.
Example: "He played much; so, his clothes became dirty".
It can be used in two phrases, where the second is a reason for the first.
Example: "Your sister did not get high marks; because she didn't study sincerely".
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
and Church Slavonic, a semicolon indicates a question, similar to a Latin question mark
Question mark
The question mark , is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence in English and many other languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions...
. To indicate a long pause or separate sections, each with commas (the semicolon's purpose in English), Greek uses an ano teleia ( · ).
Examples:
Greek: Με συγχωρείτε· πού είναι οι τουαλέτες; (Excuse me; where are the toilets?)
Church Slavonic: гдѣ єсть рождeйсѧ царь їудeйскій; (Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? - Matthew 2:1)
Literature
Some authors have spurned the semicolon throughout their works. Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss is an English writer and journalist, best known for her popular book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.-Early life:...
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
spliced his way merrily through such novels as Molloy and Malone Dies, thumbing his nose at the semicolon all the way," "James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P. G. Wodehouse
P. G. Wodehouse
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years and his many writings continue to be...
did an effortlessly marvellous job without it; George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming up for Air, (1939)," "Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
included just one semicolon in Money (1984)," and "Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
was congratulated by an academic reader for using no semicolons in The Name of the Rose (1983)."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...
in A Man Without a Country (2005) stated: "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." In response to Vonnegut and Truss, Ben MacIntyre
Ben Macintyre
Ben Macintyre is a British author, historian, and columnist writing for The Times newspaper. His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.- Author :...
, columnist in the Times of London, wrote: "Americans have long regarded the semi-colon with suspicion, as a genteel, self-conscious, neither-one-thing-nor-the other sort of punctuation mark, with neither the butchness of a full colon nor the flighty promiscuity of the comma. Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...
wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons."
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language....
Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems....
In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal is a positional numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16. It uses sixteen distinct symbols, most often the symbols 0–9 to represent values zero to nine, and A, B, C, D, E, F to represent values ten to fifteen...
. Scripts comprising wide characters, such as kanji
Kanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
, use a full-width equivalent, ;, located at Unicode code point U+FF1B (fullwidth semicolon).
Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...
, the semicolon is often used to separate multiple statements
Statement (programming)
In computer programming a statement can be thought of as the smallest standalone element of an imperative programming language. A program written in such a language is formed by a sequence of one or more statements. A statement will have internal components .Many languages In computer programming...
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...
SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems ....
). In other languages, semicolons are called terminators and are required after every statement (such as in Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...
s and LISP dialects) use semicolons to mark the beginning of comment
Comment (computer programming)
In computer programming, a comment is a programming language construct used to embed programmer-readable annotations in the source code of a computer program. Those annotations are potentially significant to programmers but typically ignorable to compilers and interpreters. Comments are usually...
In computer science, NOP or NOOP is an assembly language instruction, sequence of programming language statements, or computer protocol command that effectively does nothing at all....
(no operation or null command) in C/C++, useful in busy waiting synchronization
Synchronization
Synchronization is timekeeping which requires the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. The familiar conductor of an orchestra serves to keep the orchestra in time....
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
code:
int main(void)
{
int x, y;
x = 1; y = 2; // Two statements are separated by the semicolon
std::cout << x << std::endl;
while (wait_event) ;
return 0;
}
Conventionally, in many languages, each statement is written on a separate line, but this is not typically a requirement of the language. In the above example, two statements are placed on the same line; this is legal, since the semicolon separates the two statements.
The semicolon is often used to separate elements of a string of text. For example, multiple e-mail addresses in the "To" field in some e-mail clients have to be delimited
Delimiter
A delimiter is a sequence of one or more characters used to specify the boundary between separate, independent regions in plain text or other data streams. An example of a delimiter is the comma character, which acts as a field delimiter in a sequence of comma-separated values.Delimiters represent...
by a semicolon.
The semicolon is commonly used as parts of emoticons, in order to indicate wink
Wink
A wink is a facial expression made by briefly closing one eye. A wink is an informal mode of non-verbal communication usually signalling shared hidden knowledge or intent, which may also include, in some contexts, sexual attraction....
Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...
, the semicolon is used as a list separator, especially in cases where the decimal separator is a comma, such as 0,32; 3,14; 4,50, instead of 0.32, 3.14, 4.50.
MATLAB is a numerical computing environment and fourth-generation programming language. Developed by MathWorks, MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages,...
, the semicolon can be used as a row separator when defining a vector or matrix (whereas a comma separates the columns within a row of a vector or matrix) or to execute a command silently, without displaying the resulting output value in the console.
In the markup languages SGML, HTML, XHTML and XML, a character entity reference is a reference to a particular kind of named entity that has been predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition . The "replacement text" of the entity consists of a single character from the Universal...
In mathematics, a function associates one quantity, the argument of the function, also known as the input, with another quantity, the value of the function, also known as the output. A function assigns exactly one output to each input. The argument and the value may be real numbers, but they can...
, a semicolon may be used to separate variables and parameters.
In differential geometry, a semicolon preceding an index
Index (mathematics)
The word index is used in variety of senses in mathematics.- General :* In perhaps the most frequent sense, an index is a number or other symbol that indicates the location of a variable in a list or array of numbers or other mathematical objects. This type of index is usually written as a...
In mathematics, the covariant derivative is a way of specifying a derivative along tangent vectors of a manifold. Alternatively, the covariant derivative is a way of introducing and working with a connection on a manifold by means of a differential operator, to be contrasted with the approach given...
of a function with respect to the coordinate associated with that index.
Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
, a semicolon may be used to separate variables and parameters.