Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index

Semicolon

A semicolon is a punctuation mark. It is used to join two sentences slightly more closely than they would be joined if separated by a full stop (or period). The semicolon is also used as a sort of "senior comma" to make meaning clear in a sentence where commass are already being used for other purposes.

Examples:

I am alone; my wife had to leave.
I traveled to London, England; Tijuana, Mexico; and Reykjavik, Iceland.
Lisa scored 2,845,770 points; Marcia, 2,312,860; and Jeff, 1,726,640.

In computer programming, the semicolon corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 59, or 0x003B.