Semicolon


The semicolon or semi-colon is a symbol commonly used as orthographic punctuation. In the English language, a semicolon can be used between two closely related independent clauses, provided they are not already joined by a coordinating conjunction. Semicolons can also be used in place of commas to separate the items in a list, particularly when the elements of that list contain commas.

History

The first printed semicolon was the work of the Italian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder in 1494. Manutius established the practice of using the semicolon to separate words of opposed meaning and to allow a rapid change in direction in connecting interdependent statements. Ben Jonson was the first notable English writer to use the semicolon systematically. The modern uses of the semicolon relate either to the listing of items or to the linking of related clauses.

English

Although terminal marks indicate the end of a sentence, the comma, semicolon, and colon are normally sentence-internal, making them secondary boundary marks. The semicolon falls between terminal marks and the comma; its strength is equal to that of the colon.

Constraints

  1. When a semicolon marks the left boundary of a constituent, the right boundary is marked by punctuation of equal or greater strength.
  2. When two or more semicolons are used within a single construction, all constituents are at the same level, unlike commas, which can separate, for example, subordinate clauses from main clauses.

    Usage

Semicolons are followed by a lower case letter, unless that letter would ordinarily be capitalized mid-sentence. In older English printed texts, colons and semicolons are offset from the preceding word by a non-breaking space, a convention still current in present-day continental French texts. Ideally, the space is less wide than the inter-word spaces. Some guides recommend separation by a hair space. Modern style guides recommend no space before them and one space after. They also typically recommend placing semicolons outside ending quotation marks, although this was not always the case. For example, the first edition of The Chicago Manual of Style recommended placing the semicolon inside ending quotation marks.
Applications of the semicolon in English include:

Arabic

In Arabic, the semicolon is called Fasila Manqoota which means literally "a dotted comma", and is written inverted. In Arabic, the semicolon has several uses:
In Greek and Church Slavonic, a semicolon indicates a question, similar to a Latin question mark. To indicate a long pause or separate sections, each with commas, Greek uses, but extremely rarely, the translit=áno teleía, an interpunct.
Church Slavonic example: гдѣ єсть рождeйсѧ царь їудeйскій;

French

In French, a semicolon is a separation between two full sentences, used where either a colon or a comma would not be appropriate. The phrase following a semicolon has to be an independent clause, which is related to the previous one.
The dash character is used in French writing too, but not as widely as the semicolon. Usage of these devices varies from author to author.

Literature

Some authors have avoided and rejected the usage of the semicolon throughout their works. Lynne Truss stated that:
"Samuel Beckett spliced his way merrily through such novels as Molloy and Malone Dies, thumbing his nose at the semicolon all the way. James Joyce preferred the colon, as he thought it was more authentically classical. P. G. Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvelous job without it, George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming Up for Air, Martin Amis included just one semicolon in Money, and Umberto Eco was congratulated by an academic reader for using zero semicolons in The Name of the Rose."
In response to Truss, Ben Macintyre, a columnist in The Times, wrote:
"Americans have long regarded the semi-colon with suspicion, as a genteel, self-conscious, neither-one-thing-nor-the other sort of punctuation mark, with neither the butchness of a full colon nor the flighty promiscuity of the comma. Hemingway, Chandler and Stephen King wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon. Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons." In his book titled A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut writes that: "Semicolons are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."

Encoding in digital media

The semicolon was common on typewriters and therefore was assigned a position in most computer codes, such as EBCDIC at 94, and ASCII at 59. The ASCII position was inherited by Unicode, which has also added several related characters:

Programming

In computer programming, the semicolon is often used to separate multiple statements. In other languages, semicolons are called terminators and are required after every statement. Today semicolons as terminators has largely won out, but this was a divisive issue in programming languages from the 1960s into the 1980s. An influential and frequently-cited study in this debate was, which concluded strongly in favor of semicolon as a terminator: "The most important was that having a semicolon as a statement terminator was better than having a semicolon as a statement separator."char|,sndsndchar|.snd

Data

The semicolon is often used to separate elements of a string of text. For example, multiple e-mail addresses in the "To" field in some e-mail clients have to be delimited by a semicolon.
In Microsoft Excel, the semicolon is used as a list separator, especially in cases where the decimal separator is a comma, such as 0,32; 3,14; 4,50, instead of 0.32, 3.14, 4.50.
In MATLAB and GNU Octave, the semicolon can be used as a row separator when defining a vector or matrix or to execute a command silently, without displaying the resulting output value in the console.
In HTML, a semicolon is used to terminate a character entity reference, either named or numeric. The declarations of a style attribute in Cascading Style Sheets are separated and terminated with semicolons.
The file system of VAX/VMS, Files-11, uses semicolons to indicate a file's version number. The semicolon is permitted in long filenames in the Microsoft Windows file systems NTFS and VFAT, but not in its short names.
In some delimiter-separated values file formats, the semicolon is used as the separator character, as an alternative to comma-separated values.

Mathematics

In the argument list of a mathematical function, a semicolon may be used to separate variables from fixed parameters.
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.
In the calculus of relations, the semicolon is used in infix notation for the composition of relations:

Other uses

The semicolon is commonly used as parts of emoticons, in order to indicate winking or crying, as in ;).
Project Semicolon is the name of a faith-based anti-suicide initiative which has led to the punctuation mark becoming a highly symbolic and popular tattoo, which is most commonly done on the wrist.
The Humphrey point is sometimes used instead of a decimal point in duodecimal numbers.