Semicolon ;

;

U+003B

Symbol Meaning

Semicolon is one of the punctuation marks implemented by Aldus Manutius in the 15th century. Approximately at the same period of time it was noticed in Russian texts. The main function of a semicolon is to separate parts of complex sentences and convey the average meaning somewhere between a period and a comma. In Greek and Church Slavonic languages, it indicates a question (there is a separate symbol in Unicode for it). See more types of semicolons: ⁏ , ⸵ , ﹔ .

As for other writing systems, there semicolons are replaced by the following marks:

· Greek.

؛ Arabic.

፤ Ethiopic.

꛶ Bamum.

․ But. Armenian. Also used as a colon.

The symbol “Semicolon” is included in the “ASCII punctuation” subblock of the “Basic Latin” block and was approved as part of Unicode version 1.1 in 1993.

This text is also available in: Русский;

Unicode Name	Semicolon
Unicode Number
Entity	&semi;
Plane	0: Basic Multilingual Plane
Unicode Block	Basic Latin
Unicode Subblock	ASCII punctuation
Unicode Version	1.1 (1993)
Alt Code	Alt 59

Type of paired mirror bracket (bidi)	None
Composition Exclusion	No
Case change	003B
Simple case change	003B
Grapheme_Base	+
scripts	Common
Terminal_Punctuation	+
Pattern_Syntax	+

Encoding	hex	dec (bytes)	dec	binary
UTF-8	3B	59	59	00111011
UTF-16BE	00 3B	0 59	59	00000000 00111011
UTF-16LE	3B 00	59 0	15104	00111011 00000000
UTF-32BE	00 00 00 3B	0 0 0 59	59	00000000 00000000 00000000 00111011
UTF-32LE	3B 00 00 00	59 0 0 0	989855744	00111011 00000000 00000000 00000000