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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.
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]
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.
Graphically, the exclamation mark is represented by variations on the theme of a period with a vertical line above. One theory of its origin posits derivation from a Latin exclamation of joy, namely io, analogous to "hooray"; copyists wrote the Latin word io at the end of a sentence, to indicate expression of joy.
The semicolon; (or semi-colon [1]) is a symbol commonly used as orthographic punctuation.In the English language, a semicolon is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought, such as when restating the preceding idea with a different expression.
In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." In traditional grammar , it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thought, or as a unit consisting of a subject and predicate .
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
The colon, :, is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots aligned vertically. A colon often precedes an explanation, a list, [1] or a quoted sentence. [2] It is also used between hours and minutes in time, [1] between certain elements in medical journal citations, [3] between chapter and verse in Bible citations, [4] between a two numbers in a ratio, and, in the US, for ...