A semicolon ( ; ) is a kind 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.

Uses

In English, the semicolon has two main uses:

1. It binds two sentences more closely than they would be if separated by a full stop or period. It often replaces a conjunction such as and or but. A writer 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.
2. It is used as a stronger division than a 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.

In Greek, a semicolon indicates a question, similar to a Latin question mark.

In computer programming:

1. The semicolon corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 59, or 0x003B. In many procedural programming languages it separates instructions (such as in Pascal and JavaScript), or terminates them (as in Ada, Java, C, and C++). In some assembly languages and many other types of code, a line beginning with a semicolon is a comment.

Examples

I am alone; my wife had to leave.

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

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

Quotes

"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college." - Kurt Vonnegut

External link

• History of the semicolon