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Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. [1] The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections.
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.
Punctuation in the English language helps the reader to understand a sentence through visual means other than just the letters of the alphabet. [1] English punctuation has two complementary aspects: phonological punctuation, linked to how the sentence can be read aloud, particularly to pausing; [2] and grammatical punctuation, linked to the structure of the sentence. [3]
In marketing and advertising, asterisks or other symbols are used to refer readers discreetly to terms or conditions for a certain statement, the "small print". In English-language typography the asterisk is placed after all other punctuation marks (for example, commas, colons, or periods) except for the dash. [52] [53]
The hyphen-minus is used as a minus sign in computer programming languages, and in math mode, but in text, the proper typographical symbol for negation or subtraction is the minus sign, available in the "Special characters" dropdown of the edit pane among the "Symbols" in the list ≥ ± − × ÷ ← → · § ‽ where the third character is ...
Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage provides an early example of the rule: "All signs of punctuation used with words in quotation marks must be placed according to the sense." [28] When dealing with words-as-words, short-form works and sentence fragments, this style places periods and commas outside the quotation marks:
The enumeration or ideographic comma (U+3001 、 IDEOGRAPHIC COMMA) is used in Chinese, [37]: 20 Japanese punctuation, and somewhat in Korean punctuation. In China and Korea, this comma (顿号; 頓號; dùnhào) is usually only used to separate items in lists, while it is the more common form of comma in Japan (読点, tōten, lit.
Many (but not all) graphemes that are part of a writing system that encodes a full spoken language are included in the Unicode standard, which also includes graphical symbols. See: Language code; List of Unicode characters; List of writing systems; Punctuation; List of typographical symbols and punctuation marks