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Commonly used punctuation marks

A select few most common examples utilized by English and other languages using the Roman alphabet are listed following (by owning their Unicode preferred names, in which appropriate).

Because of the limited total of characters available within ASCII, many one punctuation characters develop besides run specialised meanings within computer programs composed on ASCII keyboards. A dot and commercial at in e-mail addresses are examples of this kinda have. Look at a single articles.

A single articles used following include info around utilise & abuse in English & provide examples:

apostrophe ( ' ), ( ’ ) bracket - i.e., parentheses (aka spherical brackets) ((, )), square brackets ([, ]), curly brackets (aka braces) ('), & angle brackets (⟨, ⟩) colon (:) comma (,) dash – i.e., figure dash(‒), en dash (–), em dash (—), & quotation dash (―) ellipsis or suspension points (...) exclamation mark (!) full stop or period (.) hyphen (-), (‐) interrobang (‽) (symbol resembles a wonder mark placed all over an exclamation mark) question mark (?) quotation marks (British English: inverted commas) and guillemets ('; ‘, ’; "; “,”; ‹, ›) semicolon (;') slash or solidus (/) 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 (*) asterism (⁂) bullet (•; more) at (@) currency (¤) dagger or obelisk (†) and double dagger (‡) number sign (#) – aka pound sign, hash, crosshatch, octothorp, etc. prime ( ′ ) tilde or swung dash (~) underscore ( _ ) vertical bar (|) greater than sign ( > ) less than sign ( < )

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.

East Asian punctuation

Chinese and Japanese use a different set of punctuation marks. 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.

Whilst Western languages use a narrow space between each letter, and a wider space between words, text in Chinese characters uses a narrow space between each character and no wider space between words. In this way it somewhat resembles the scriptio continua of ancient Greek and Latin.

Some punctuation marks are similar to their equivalent Western ones, but larger and occupying a squarer area, to suit the characters that surround the mark. These punctuation marks are called "fullwidth" to contrast them from "halfwidth" Western punctuation marks: ！ is the exclamation mark (!). ？ is the question mark (?). ； is the semi-colon (;). ： is the colon (:). （） are curved brackets or parentheses (()). 【】 are square brackets ([]). Other punctuation marks are a little more different than Western ones: The Chinese and Japanese full stop (or "cycle") is a small circle (。). 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. For Traditional Chinese, the quotation marks 『』 and 「」 are used for vertical texts, and both the above quotation marks and fullwidth Western-style quotation marks, “â€? and ‘’ can be used for horizontal texts. In Simplified Chinese, text is usually written horizontally only, and only the Western-style quotation marks are used. The single quotation marks are used only when embedded within double quotation marks in Simplified Chinese, while the reverse is true in Traditional Chinese. The role of the comma is split up. In Chinese, the regular fullwidth comma (，) is used, except when used as a serial comma (i.e. separating words constituting a list), in which case the caesura sign (頓號/顿号; pinyin: dùn hào), nicknamed sesame dot, is used instead. 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), and a middle dot is often used as a serial comma. There is also a middle dot, with fullwidth (・) and halfwidth (·) varieties. One of the uses of the middle dot in both Chinese and Japanese is to separate words in a foreign name, since native first and last names in Chinese or Japanese are not separated using any punctuation, e.g. "Leonardo da Vinci" in Simplified Chinese: "列奥那多·达·芬奇". In Japanese, the middle dot is often also used as a serial comma. 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. Italic type is never used in Chinese or Japanese writing. Two of the roles of italics in Western writing are fulfilled by punctuation marks in Chinese writing: For emphasis, Chinese uses emphasis marks instead of italics. Each emphasis mark is a single dot is 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 are inconvenient to input. For book titles, Chinese uses fullwidth double book title marks, 《book title》, and fullwidth single book title marks, 〈book title〉. The latter is used only when embedded within the former. In Traditional Chinese, a wavy underline (ï¹?ï¹?) is occasionally used (to the left of characters for vertical texts). A proper noun mark (an underline) is occasionally used in Chinese, such 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. 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. In Chinese, the ellipsis is written with six dots occupying the same space as two characters (……), not three. Similarly, the dash is written so that it occupies the space of two characters (——). In Japanese, a 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). This is possible because spaces are not normally used between words in Japanese writing. There is no equivalent of the apostrophe in Chinese or Japanese.

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

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

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

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

comma (resembles an English colon) sentence end (resembles four dots at the corners of an imaginary square) colon (resembels an English colon with two small horizontal lines, one above and one below) semicolon (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)

See also [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm Ethiopic Script].

Oringinally Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 1600s+, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written in DevNagri script, used the vertical bar (|) to end a line of a verse and double vertical bars (||) to end the verse.

Legal issues

A patent has been granted for two new punctuation marks, the question comma and the exclamation comma. [http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=WO9219458&F=0]