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 all emphasis and disambiguation is possible to convey in print, even with punctuation. Ancient Chinese classical texts were transmitted without punctuation. However, many Warring States period bamboo texts contain the symbols and indicating the end of a chapter and full stop, respectively. By the Song dynasty, addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common. The earliest alphabetic writing had no capitalization, no spaces, no vowels and few punctuation marks. This worked as long as the subject matter was restricted to a limited range of topics (e.g., writing used for recording business transactions). Punctuation is historically an