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Typographical symbols and punctuation marks are marks and symbols used in typography with a variety of purposes such as to help with legibility and accessibility, or to identify special cases. This list gives those most commonly encountered with Latin script. For a far more comprehensive list of symbols and signs, see List of Unicode characters.
The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline.The most common versions are the en dash –, generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the em dash —, longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontal bar —, whose length varies ...
The compound point is an obsolete typographical construction. Keith Houston reported that this form of punctuation doubling, which involved the comma dash (,—), the semicolon dash (;—), the colon dash, or "dog's bollocks" (:—), and less often the stop-dash (.—) arose in the seventeenth century, citing examples from as early as 1622 (in an edition of Othello).
Spaced en dashes are also used to set aside a phrase – like this – in a sentence; when this is done, it is preferred that a non-breaking space be used before the en dash and a normal one after it: – . Em dash (— or —, MOS:EMDASH) are even longer and are used solely to set aside a phrase—like this—in a sentence.
The abbreviation is not always a short form of the word used in the clue. For example: "Knight" for N (the symbol used in chess notation) Taking this one stage further, the clue word can hint at the word or words to be abbreviated rather than giving the word itself. For example: "About" for C or CA (for "circa"), or RE.
In 19th-century texts, British English and American English both frequently used the terms period and full stop. [ 9 ] [ 1 ] The word period was used as a name for what printers often called the "full point", the punctuation mark that was a dot on the baseline and used in several situations.
In English, the en dash is commonly used for inclusive ranges (e.g., "pages 12–17" or "August 7, 1988 – November 26, 2005"), to connect prefixes to open compounds (e.g., "pre–World War II"). [3] The en-dash is also increasingly used to replace the long dash ("—", also called an em dash or em rule). When using it to replace a long dash ...
In English, when a quotation follows other writing on a line of text, a space precedes the opening quotation mark unless the preceding symbol, such as an em dash, requires that there be no space. When a quotation is followed by other writing on a line of text, a space follows the closing quotation mark unless it is immediately followed by other ...