Colon (punctuation) Colon (punctuation) The colon ( : ) is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line. A colon precedes an explanation or an enumeration, or list. A colon is also used with ratios, titles and subtitles of books, city and publisher in bibliographies, Biblical citations between chapter and verse, and for salutations business letters and other formal letter writing, and often to separate hours and minutes. The most common use of the colon is to inform the reader that what follows the colon proves, explains, defines, describes, or lists elements of what preceded
Slovene punctuation to illustrate that a word is not used as it normally is, or simply to emphasise it. Usually, in printed texts, such words are printed either "italic" or bold as opposed to using excessive quotes. Inverted commas are also used to mark proper nouns that could be mistaken for common nouns, such as at sentence beginnings. A dash (–) is a one or two part non-leaning punctuation mark (except where noted). Semantically, there is no difference between the longer and the shorter dash, – and –, although common usage prefers the shorter one in all cases except upon connection of