Semicolon ;
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.
| Unicode Name | Semicolon |
| Unicode Number | |
| HTML Code | |
| CSS Code | |
| Entity | ; |
| Plane | 0: Basic Multilingual Plane |
| Unicode Block | Basic Latin |
| Unicode Subblock | ASCII punctuation |
| Unicode Version | 1.1 (1993) |
| Alt Code |
| 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 |