Punctuation the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight". Cecil Hartley's poem identifies their relative values: <poem style=margin:4em;> The stop point out, with truth, the time of pause A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause. At ev'ry comma, stop while "one" you count; At semicolon, "two" is the amount; A colon doth require the time of "three"; The period "four", as learned men agree. </poem> The use of punctuation was not standardised until after the invention of printing. According to the 1885 edition of "The American Printer", the importance of punctuation was noted in various sayings by children such as: <poem style=margin:4em;>
Slash (punctuation) a slash distinguished from such other marks derives from the medieval European virgule (, which was used as a period, scratch comma, and caesura mark. (The first sense was eventually lost to the low dot and the other two developed separately into the comma and caesura mark .) Its use as a comma became especially widespread in France, where it was also used to mark the continuation of a word onto the next line of a page, a sense later taken on by the hyphen . The Fraktur script used throughout Central Europe in the early modern period used a