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semicolon

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Also known as semi-colon, Greek question mark, Church Slavonic question mark

The 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.

AI overview

A semicolon is a punctuation mark used to connect two independent sentences that are closely related in meaning, giving them equal importance within a single sentence. It's also useful for separating items in a list when those items already contain commas, making the overall structure clearer.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Wikidata facts

Image: Semicolon.svg

Show 7 more facts

HTML entity: ;
Commons category: Semicolons
Unicode character: ;
time of discovery or invention: 1494-00-00
code: -.-.-.
Unicode code point: 003B
Unicode character name: SEMICOLON

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Article

17 sections

Contents

History
Natural languages
English
Arabic
Greek and Church Slavonic
French
Literature
Character encoding
Computing
Programming
Data
Mathematics
Other uses
See also
Notes
References
Further reading

The 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.

The semicolon is one of the least understood of the standard marks, and is not frequently used by many English speakers.

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Lang and lang-xx code promoted to ISO 639-1 Punctuation