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punctuation mark
Sign in to saveAlso known as punctuation mark (sentence-structuring)
symbols indicating structure and organization of written language, intonation, and pauses; opposite to intra-word orthographical elements (apostrophes, hyphens, etc.)
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- semantic punctuation mark
Show 6 more facts
- model item
- quotation mark
- Commons category
- Punctuation
- different from
- punctuation
- topic's main category
- Category:Punctuation marks
- studied by
- punctuation
- topic has template
- Template:Punctuation marks
via Wikidata · CC0
~23 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs.
By the 19th century, grammarians explained the difference between the punctuation marks by means of a hierarchy that ascribed different weight to them. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “punctuation mark” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.