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
Punctuation of English the dot used as a thousands separator (though a thin space is sometimes used for the latter purpose, especially in technical writing, regardless what the decimal separator is). In computing, the dot is used as a delimiter more broadly, as site and file names ("wikipedia.org", "192.168.0.1." "document.txt"), and serves special functions in various programming and scripting languages. Guillemets sometimes called French quotation marks, are relatively uncommon in English, but are sometimes used as a form of quotation mark. The question mark is used to mark the end of a sentence which is a question. Quotation marks are used to mark