Vertical Semicolon

It marks a strong break inside a sentence, not the sentence’s end.

In Chinese punctuation, the semicolon separates parallel clauses—especially clauses that already contain commas—marks a major break in a complex sentence, or divides list items. Its break is stronger than a comma but stays inside the larger sentence.

Older Chinese books used marks such as circles to guide sentence reading. A government-approved punctuation scheme from 1919–1920 included the semicolon among marks intended to make grammatical relationships clearer.

How do I type the vertical semicolon?

Enter FE14 in a Unicode-aware character picker or input tool.

A normal keyboard ; inserts the ordinary semicolon, not ︔. In a Unicode string literal, use \uFE14; in HTML source, use ︔. For new vertical text, enter ; and let the writing layout handle its orientation.

FE14 remains for compatibility with legacy Chinese encoding, including GB 18030 round-tripping. A renderer can also turn ordinary ; sideways without changing its code point.

Why does vertical semicolon look different from ;?

It stores a vertical presentation, not a different punctuation meaning.

Unicode’s compatibility mapping links ︔ to ordinary ; (U+003B). Vertical layout can turn ordinary ; sideways while leaving its code point unchanged; ︔ keeps a distinct identity unless compatibility normalization folds it into ;.

Use the exact form when preserving legacy data or code-point identity matters. For new vertical prose, the ordinary semicolon with vertical layout is generally enough.