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
Chinese punctuation hyphen is only used when writing translated foreign names with hyphens. Otherwise, it is not used in Chinese and omitted when translating compound words. Several punctuation marks have ranges of use that differ from the way they are used in English, though some functions may overlap. Chinese punctuation Chinese punctuation uses a different set of punctuation marks from European languages, although the concept of modern standard punctuation was adapted in the written language during the 20th century from Western punctuation marks. Before that, the concept of punctuation in Chinese literature existed mainly in the form of Judou (), a system