Punctuation

Encyclopedia : P : PU : PUN : Punctuation

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"Punctuating" redirects here. For , see .

Punctuation is the act and the effect of punctuating, i.e. using punctuation marks.Also with reference to a given writing: a bad, good punctuation; to revise, to fix the punctuation.

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, usually, intonation and pauses to be observed when reading it aloud. See orthography.

The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register, and time, and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic, and thus the author's choice. A separate consideration should be reserved to tachigraphic language forms such as those used in chats and telephonic short messages. An English language bibliography may be found at the end of this article.

Common punctuation marks and typographical symbols

Punctuation
apostrophe ( ' ) ( ’ ) brackets ( ( ) ) ( [ ] ) ( ) ( 〈 〉 ) colon ( : ) comma ( , ) dashes ( ‒ ) ( – ) ( — ) ( ― ) ellipsis ( … ) ( ... ) exclamation mark ( ! ) full stop/period ( . ) guillemets ( « » ) hyphen ( - ) ( ‐ ) interpunct ( · ) question mark ( ? ) quotation marks ( " ) ( ‘ ’ ) ( “ ” ) semicolon ( ; ) slash/solidus ( / )
Interword separation
spaces (   ) (   ) (   )
General typography
ampersand ( & ) asterisk ( * ) asterism ( ⁂ ) at ( @ ) backslash ( \ ) bullet ( • ) caret ( ^ ) currency ( ¤ ) & ¢, $, €, £, ¥ dagger ( † ) ( ‡ ) degree ( ° ) interrobang ( ‽ ) number sign ( # ) percent and related signs ( % ) ( ‰ ) ( ‱ ) pilcrow ( ¶ ) prime ( ′ ) Inverted exclamation point (¡) inverted question mark (¿) section sign ( § ) tilde ( ~ ) Irony mark Sarcasm mark umlaut/diaresis ( ¨ ) underscore/understrike ( _ ) vertical line/pipe/broken bar ( | ) ( ¦ )

The box on the side provides a concise summary of the following:

punctuation marks

these are the most common marks appearing in English and other languages using the Roman alphabet. Their preferred Unicode name is used; specific articles provide more details on their English usage and alternative names, if any.

spaces

Spaces provide interword separation. Having no mark at all, a space does not belong to punctuation marks. Nonetheless, it shares with punctuation marks the office to organize and clarify writing.

other typographical marks (or glyphs)

Typographical symbols that are still used today and do not belong to punctuation marks.

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.

Because of the limited number of characters available in ASCII, many punctuation and typographical characters have been given specialized meanings in some computing contexts. The colon in URLs and the commercial at in e-mail addresses are examples of this kind of use.

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

East Asian punctuation

Chinese and Japanese use a different set of punctuation marks from Western languages. These only came into use relatively recently, the ancient forms of these languages having no punctuation at all. Traditional poetry and calligraphy maintains this punctuation-free style.

Nearly all of the punctuation marks used are larger than their Western counterparts and occupy a square area that is the same size as the characters around them. These punctuation marks are called "fullwidth" to contrast them from "halfwidth" Western punctuation marks.

Japanese and Traditional Chinese can be written horizontally or vertically, while Simplified Chinese is rarely written vertically. Some punctuation marks adapt to this change in direction: the parentheses, curved brackets, square quotation marks (Japanese and Traditional Chinese), book title marks (Chinese), ellipsis mark, dash, and wavy dash (Japanese) all rotate themselves 90 degrees when used in vertical rather than horizontal text. The three underline-like punctuation marks in Chinese (proper noun mark, wavy book title mark, and emphasis mark) rotate and shift to the left side of the text in vertical script (shifting to the right side of the text is also possible, but this is outmoded and can clash with the placement of other punctuation marks).

Major differences between Western and Chinese/Japanese punctuation marks include:

• Some punctuation marks are similar in use to their equivalent Western ones. The only difference is in size: they are fullwidth instead of halfwidth:
• *！ is the exclamation mark (!).
• *？ is the question mark (?).
• *； is the semicolon (;).
• *： is the colon (:).
• *（ ） are curved brackets or parentheses (( )).
• *【 】 are square brackets ([ ]).
• Other punctuation marks are more different, whether in shape or usage:
• * The Chinese and Japanese full stop is a fullwidth small circle (。). Its Chinese name is 句号 (jùhào). In horizontally-written Japanese, the full stop is placed in the same position as it would be in English; in vertical writing, it is placed below and to the right of the last Character. In Chinese, the full stop is always after the last character.
• * In Japanese and Traditional Chinese, the double and single quotation marks are fullwidth 『 』 and 「 」. The double quotation marks are used when embedded within single quotation marks: 「...『...』...」.
• ** In Traditional Chinese, Western-style quotation marks “” and ‘’ can also be used for horizontal texts. In Simplified Chinese, only the Western-style quotation marks are used. Here, the single quotation marks are used when embedded within double quotation marks: “...‘...’...”. These quotation marks are fullwidth in printed matter but share the same codepoints as the Western quotation marks in Unicode, so they require a Chinese-language font to be displayed correctly.
• * In Chinese, the fullwidth comma (，), called 逗號/逗号 (dòuhào), has the same shape as the Western comma. In Japanese, the fullwidth comma (、) 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.
• * Chinese also has a repetition comma called 頓號/顿号 (dùnhào), which must be used instead of the regular comma when separating words constituting a list. It is identical to the Japanese fullwidth comma (、). In Japanese, either the regular fullwidth comma (、) or a fullwidth middle dot (・) is used for this purpose.
• * Both Chinese and Japanese use a middle dot to separate words in a foreign name, since native first and last names in Chinese or Japanese are not separated using any punctuation or spaces. For example, "Leonardo da Vinci" in Simplified Chinese: "列奥纳多·达·芬奇", in Japanese: "レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ". Japanese always uses the fullwidth middle dot (・). In Chinese, the middle dot is also fullwidth in printed matter, but the halfwidth middle dot (·) is used in computer input, which is then rendered as fullwidth in Chinese-language fonts.
• * For emphasis, Chinese and Japanese use emphasis marks instead of italic type. Each emphasis mark is a single dot (in Chinese) or dash (in Japanese) placed under each character to be emphasized (for vertical text, the dot is placed to the left hand side of each character). Although frequent in printed matter, emphasis marks are rare online, as they cannot be represented as plain text, are not supported by HTML and most word processors, and otherwise inconvenient to input. In Japanese, these emphasis marks are called bōten or wakiten.
• * For book titles, Chinese uses fullwidth double book title marks, 《book title》, and fullwidth single book title marks, 〈book title〉. The latter is used when embedded within the former: 《...〈...〉...》; in Traditional Chinese, the latter is also used for articles in or sections of a book. In Japanese, book titles are marked out using double quotation marks 『 』. (Italic type is never used in Chinese or Japanese.)
• * A proper noun mark (an underline) is occasionally used in Chinese, such as in teaching materials and some movie subtitles. For consistency in style, a wavy underline (﹏﹏) is used instead of the regular book title marks whenever the proper noun mark is used in the same text. When the text runs vertically, the proper name mark is written as a line to the left of the characters (to the right in some older books).
• * In Chinese, the ellipsis is written with six dots (not three) occupying the same space as two characters (……) in the center of the line. Similarly, the dash is written so that it occupies the space of two characters (——) in the center of the line. There should be no breaking in the line. The Japanese ellipsis is also properly written as six dots, not three.
• * When connecting two words to signify a range, Chinese generally uses a fullwidth dash occupying the space of one character (—, e.g. 1月—7月 "January to July"), while Japanese generally uses a fullwidth wavy dash occupying the space of one character (～, e.g. 1月～7月 "January to July"). The wavy dash is also sometimes used in Chinese and Korean.
• * While Western languages use a narrow space between each letter, and a wider space between words, Chinese and Japanese use a narrow space both between characters and between words. In this way, it somewhat resembles the scriptio continua of ancient Greek and Latin.
• ** There are a small number of exceptions. In Japanese, a fullwidth space is often used where a colon or comma would be used in English: 大和銀行　大阪支店 (Yamato Bank, Osaka Branch). The fullwidth space is extremely rare in modern-day Chinese, but in archaic usage it may be used as an honorific marker. A modern example, found in Taiwan, is that of referring to Chiang Kai-shek as 先總統　蔣公 (Late President, Lord Chiang), where the space is an honorific marker for 蔣公; this use is also still current in very formal letters or other old-style documents. (The full width space is also sometimes used purely for spacing purposes, such as in some Chinese bibles, where the character for God, "神", replaces the characters for Lord Above, "上帝", which was the term used in early translations.)
• ** Also, when Chinese is written entirely in Hanyu Pinyin or when Japanese is written entirely in kana, spaces are always introduced to assist in reading.
• *Japanese uses iteration marks, the most common of which being 々, to indicate a repeated character. Chinese uses the iteration mark in informal or calligraphic writing, but never in careful writing or printed matter.
• * There is no equivalent of the apostrophe in Chinese or Japanese.

Korean, the third member language of CJK, currently uses mostly Western punctuation. Some South Korean differences:

• The middle dot (·) is used in short lists of similar items. For example: "사과·배·복숭아·수박은 모두 과일이다." Translation: "Apples, pears, peaches, and watermelons are all fruits."
• Although the "correct" way of quoting is to use double quotation marks, fullwidth quotes such as 『 』 or 「 」 are commonly used in print.
• Since Korean is agglutinative, rules regarding parentheses and spaces are different from Western rules. For example, in the sentence "사과(沙果)는 과일이다," inserting a space in between other letters and the parentheses will be an error.

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

Other scripts

Ethiopian languages, including Amharic, Tigrinya, Ge'ez, and Afaan Oromo, make use of the following punctuation marks:

• space (፡) (resembles an English colon)
• comma (፣) (resembles an English colon with a line on top)
• sentence end (።) (resembles four dots at the corners of an imaginary square)
• semicolon (፤) (resembles an English colon with two small horizontal lines, one above and one below)
• colon (፥) (resembles an English colon with a small horizontal line between the dots)
• preface colon (፦) (resembles an English colon with a small horizontal line between the dots but more to the right than in the semicolon)
• question mark (፧) (three dots in a vertical line)
• paragraph separator (፨) (seven dots: three in a vertical line flanked by two vertical lines of two dots each, appearing as the corners of a hexagon with a dot in the center)

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 verse and double vertical bars (||) to end the verse.

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

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 (ανω τελεια).

Question comma and exclamation comma

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

See also

• Emoticon
• Typographical syntax
• Japanese typographic symbols

References

Notes

External links

• Unicode reference tables (

PDF):

• * [U2000] General Punctuation
• * [U3000] CJK Symbols and Punctuation
• * [UFE30] CJK Compatibility Forms
• * [UFE50] Small Form Variants
• * [UFF00] Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms

• [標點符號的種類] Chinese punctuation marks and their names ()
• [中華人民共和國國家標準標點符號用法] The PRC's National Standards on the Usage of Punctuation Marks ()
• [Japanese Punctuation Marks]
• [Ethiopic Script]

 

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