Punctuation

Punctuation marks are written symbols that do not correspond to either phonemes (sounds) of a spoken language nor to lexemes (words and phrases) of a written language, but which serve to organize or clarify written language. See orthography.

The rules of what punctuation marks should be used in what circumstances vary with language, location and time. 21st century American English is very different to 15th century Italian. The rules are constantly evolving and certain aspects of punctuation are style - the author's choice. An English language bibliograhy may be found at the end of this article.

Some common examples used by English and other languages using the Roman alphabet are listed below (with their Unicode preferred names, where appropriate).

Because of the limited number of characters available in ASCII, many of these punctuation characters have also been given specialized meanings in computer programs composed on ASCII keyboards. The dot and commercial at in e-mail addresses are examples of this kind of use. See the individual articles.

The individual articles include information on use and misuse in English and provide examples.

apostrophe ('; ’)
brackets - i.e., parentheses (aka round brackets) ((, )), square brackets ([, ]), curly brackets (aka braces) ({, }), and angle brackets (<, >)
colon (:)
comma (,)
dash – i.e., figure dash(‒), en dash (–), em dash (—), and quotation dash (―)
ellipsis or suspension points (...)
exclamation mark (!)
full stop or period (.)
hyphen (-, ‐)
interrobang (symbol resembles a question mark laid over an exclamation mark)
question mark (?)
quotation marks (British English: inverted commas) and guillemets ('; ‘, ’; "; “,”; ‹, ›)
semicolon (;)
solidus or slash (/)
space between words to provide interword separation. Because the interword space has no mark, it is arguably not a "written symbol", but it clearly serves to organize and clarify Latin script writings.

The following typographical symbols or glyphs are not true punctuation marks:

ampersand (&)
asterisk (*)
bullet (•; more)
commercial at (@)
dagger or obelisk (†) and double dagger (‡)
number sign (#) – aka pound sign, hash, crosshatch, octothorpe, etc.
tilde or swung dash (~)

Also related are diacritical marks (or diacritics), which serve to distinguish among similar sounds using the same primary letter symbol, or to clarify emphasis or tone.

Each script, and each language within a script, can have its own set of punctuation marks and usage conventions.

Table of contents

1 East Asian punctuation
2 Other scripts
3 Further reading
4 External links

East Asian punctuation

Chinese and Japanese use a different set of punctuation marks.

Some punctuation marks are similar to their equivalent Western ones, but larger, to suit the characters that surround the mark, for example, the Chinese commas (，) is larger than its Western counterpart.
Chinese and Japanese period is a small circle (。).
When the text is written vertically, the quotation marks 『』 and 「」 are used; but when the text is written horizontally both the above quotation marks and the English quotation marks, “” and ‘’, can be used.
In Chinese in addition, there are book title marks, 《book title》, (what in English rendered as italicization or underlining); and chapter marks, 〈chapter title〉, (what in English would be quotation marks).
Caesura sign (頓號 or 顿号 in pinyin: dun4 hao4), nicknamed sesame dot, is the Chinese equivalent of serial comma. It is shaped like a teardrop with the narrow sharp end pointing top-left and round end pointing bottom-right: 、 (it may be depicted on your computer in another font). In Japanese, the Chinese caesura sign is used as comma (serial or not).
Partition sign is a dot at the centre of a character space: ‧. See middle dot
Proper noun mark, which exist as underline beneath the noun, is occasionally used in Chinese (in teaching materials and some movie subtitles). When the text runs vertically, the proper name mark is written as a line to the left of the characters.

Korean, the third member language of CJK, uses Western punctuations currently.

Like Classical Chinese, traditional Mongolian language employed no punctuation at all. But now as it uses the Cyrillic alphabet, its punctuations are similar, if not identical, to Russian.

Other scripts

In ancient forms of Roman script, the interpunct served to separate words.