Colon (punctuation) sounds can also be denoted by asterisks or other punctuation marks. Colons can also be used to represent eyes in emoticons. 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
Punctuation of English their cover letters. In contrast, closed punctuation uses commas and periods in a strict manner. Closed style is common in presentations, especially in bulleted and numbered lists. It is also frequently used in advertising, marketing materials, news headlines, and signage. The approximate average frequencies for English punctuation marks per 1000 words based on 723,000 words of assorted texts are as follows (as of 2013, but with some text corpora dating to 1998 and 1987): The apostrophe , (sometimes called inverted comma in British English) is used to mark possession as in ""John's book"", and to mark letters omitted in contractions,