| Colon (punctuation) |
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A colon ("''':'''") is a Punctuation mark, visually consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line. Rarely, it is also called "'''dots'''". GRAMMAR Usage As with many other punctuation marks, the usage of colon varies among languages and, for a given language, among historical periods. As a rule of thumb, however, a colon informs the reader that what follows proves, clarifies, explains, or simply enumerates elements of what is referred to before.
Also a colon:
A Hypernym of a word :) :The Qur'an , Sura 5:18 :The concert finished at 23:45 :This File was last modified today at 11:15:05 Conventions and foreign languages In English, a colon may be followed either by a capital letter or by a lower case letter, as the author prefers (unless a capital letter is necessary for a proper noun.) In European languages the colon is usually followed by a lowercase letter (again, unless the uppercase is due to other reasons, such as a proper noun). An exception is German, where an uppercase letter must be used if the colon is followed by a complete sentence or a noun, although in all other cases a lowercase letter should be used. No space is put before a colon, except in French . In Finnish , the colon can appear inside words in a manner similar to the English Apostrophe , between a word (or abbreviation) and its grammatical suffixes. Trivia: :Many readers of the Italian writer Italo Svevo are quite surprised at seeing his usage of an uppercase letter after colons. This is not the Italian convention, nor was it at the epoch of writing. Svevo, who lived in an almost bilingual environment, adopts in fact the German usage. MATHEMATICS The colon is also used in Mathematics , Cartography , Model Building and other fields to denote a Ratio or a Scale , as in 3:1 (pronounced "three to one"). Unicode provides a distinct ratio character, Unicode U+2236 () for mathematical usage. In Logic and, correspondingly, when describing the characterizing property of a Set , it is used as an alternative to a Vertical Bar , to mean "such that". Example: ''S'' is the set of (all and only) ''x'' in such that ''x'' is greater than 1 and smaller than 3 PHONETICS A special triangular colon symbol is used in IPA to indicate a preceding long vowel. It is available in Unicode as modifier letter triangular colon, Unicode U+02D0 (). A regular colon is often used as a fallback when this character is not available. COMPUTING The colon Character has the decimal value 58 ( Hexadecimal value 3A) in Unicode and ASCII Character Encoding s. A colon is a special character in URL s and in the Path Representation of several File System s. REFERENCES |
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