Semicolon

A semicolon ( ; ) is a type of punctuation mark.

History

The origin of the semicolon is traced back to the Italian printer Aldus Manutius the elder. He used it to separate words opposed in meaning, and to mark off interdependent statements.

The earliest general use of the semicolon in English was in 1591. Shakespeare's sonnets have semicolons, and Ben Jonson was the first notable English writer to systematically use them.

Language usage

In English, the semicolon has two main purposes:

It binds two sentences more closely than they would be if separated by a full stop. It often replaces a conjunction such as and or but. Writers might consider this appropriate where they are trying to indicate a close relationship between two sentences, or a 'run-on' in meaning from one to the next; they don't wish the connection to be broken by the abrupt use of a full-stop.
It is used as a stronger division than a comma, or a "super comma" to make meaning clear in a sentence where commas are already being used for other purposes. A common example of this use is to separate the items of a list when some of the items themselves contain commas.

There are several rules that govern semicolon placement:

Use a semicolon between closely related independent clauses not joined by a coordinating conjunction: "I went to the store; it was closed."
Use a semicolon between independent clauses linked with a transitional phrase or conjunctive adverb: "I like to ride horses; however, they don't like to be ridden by me."
Use a semicolon between items in a series containing internal punctuation: "There are several Waffle Houses in Atlanta, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Pensacola, Florida; and Mobile, Alabama."

A semicolon can be used to separate independent clauses that are joined by coordinating conjunctions when the clauses have internal commas that might lead to misreading: "After the game, I won a red beanie baby, four edible ingots, and a certificate of excellence; but when the storm came, I lost it all in a torrent of sleet, snow, and profanity."

Semicolons are always followed by a lower case letter, unless that letter begins a proper noun. Semicolons are always placed after closing quotation marks.

In Greek and Church Slavonic, a semicolon indicates a question, similar to a Latin question mark. To indicate a major pause or separate sections each of which includes commas (the purposes served by semicolon in English), Greek uses a Middle Dot · (Unicode character 00B7). Greek also uses Middle Dot in place of English colon.

Examples

I am alone; my wife had to leave.

I travelled to London, England; Tijuana, Mexico; and Reykjavík, Iceland.

Lisa scored 2,845,770 points; Marcia, 2,312,860; and Jeff, 1,726,640.

Computing usage

In computer programming, the semicolon is often used to separate multiple statements (for example, Pascal and JavaScript). In these languages semicolons are statement separators. In other languages, semicolons are required after every statement (such as in PHP, Java, and the C family). In these languages semicolons are statement terminators. Other languages, for example, some assembly languages and LISP dialects, may use semicolons to mark the beginning of comments.

In computer systems, the semicolon is represented by Unicode and ASCII character 59 or 0x3B. The EBCDIC semicolon character is 95 or 0x5E.

Mathematics

In the languages of functions, a semicolon in the argument of a function preceding a variable indicates that the function may be a function of that variable, but is not necessarily.

In differential geometry, a semicolon preceding an index is used to indicate the covariant derivative of a function with respect to the coordinate associated with that index.

References

Hacker, Diana (2002). The Bedford Handbook (6th ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's ISBN 0-312-41281-9.

External links

History of the semicolon

Punctuation | Typography