What ⁚ means
It could end a sentence or serve as a speaker-change mark. Ancient Greek writing often ran words together without spaces, so punctuation marked breaks. The sign appears in an inscription at Epidaurus's Asclepieion, an ancient healing sanctuary.
A separate Greek manuscript sign, the paragraphos, could also signal a new speaker. Printers later turned many manuscript conventions into familiar punctuation.
It belongs to historical or specialist typography; in everyday prose, readers may take it for a colon.
Use a colon for ordinary punctuation; reserve ⁚ for a historical style that calls for it.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
4
Related characters
2
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does ⁚ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
12
Collections with ⁚
1
How to type or find ⁚
- Search it as
- double-dot punctuation · ancient Greek punctuation · speaker-change mark · sentence ending mark
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⁚\205ACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.