Colon (punctuation)


The colon,, is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots aligned vertically. A colon often precedes an explanation, a list, or a quoted sentence. It is also used between hours and minutes in time, between certain elements in medical journal citations, between chapter and verse in Bible citations, between two numbers in a ratio, and, in the US, for salutations in business letters and other formal letters.

History

In Ancient Greek, in rhetoric and prosody, the term did not refer to punctuation, but to a member or section of a complete thought or passage; see also Colon (rhetoric). From this usage, in palaeography, a colon is a clause or group of clauses written as a line in a manuscript.
In the 3rd century BC, Aristophanes of Byzantium is alleged to have devised a punctuation system, in which the end of such a was thought to occasion a medium-length breath, and was marked by a middot. In practice, evidence is scarce for its early usage, but it was revived later as the ano teleia, the modern Greek semicolon. Some writers also used a double dot symbol, that later came to be used as a full stop or to mark a change of speaker.
In 1589, in The Arte of English Poesie, the English term colon and the corresponding punctuation mark is attested:
In 1622, in Nicholas Okes' print of William Shakespeare's Othello, the typographical construction of a colon followed by a hyphen or dash to indicate a restful pause is attested. This construction, known as the dog's bollocks, was once common in British English, though this usage is now discouraged.
As late as the 18th century, John Mason related the appropriateness of a colon to the length of the pause taken when reading the text aloud, but silent reading eventually replaced this with other considerations.

Usage in English

In modern English usage, a complete sentence precedes a colon, while a list, description, explanation, or definition follows it. The elements which follow the colon may or may not be a complete sentence: since the colon is preceded by a sentence, it is a complete sentence whether what follows the colon is another sentence or not. While it is acceptable to capitalise the first letter after the colon in American English, it is not the case in British English, except where a proper noun immediately follows a colon.
;Colon used before list
;Colon used before a description
;Colon before definition
;Colon before explanation
Some writers use fragments before a colon for emphasis or stylistic preferences, as in this example:
The Bedford Handbook describes several uses of a colon. For example, one can use a colon after an independent clause to direct attention to a list, an appositive, or a quotation, and it can be used between independent clauses if the second summarizes or explains the first. In non-literary or non-expository uses, one may use a colon after the salutation in a formal letter, to indicate hours and minutes, to show proportions, between a title and subtitle, and between city and publisher in bibliographic entries.
Luca Serianni, an Italian scholar who helped to define and develop the colon as a punctuation mark, identified four punctuational modes for it: syntactical-deductive, syntactical-descriptive, appositive, and segmental.

Syntactical-deductive

The colon introduces the logical consequence, or effect, of a fact stated before.

Syntactical-descriptive

In this sense the colon introduces a description; in particular, it makes explicit the elements of a set.
Syntactical-descriptive colons may separate the numbers indicating hours, minutes, and seconds in abbreviated measures of time.
British English and Australian English, however, more frequently use a point for this purpose:
A colon is also used in the descriptive location of a book verse if the book is divided into verses, such as in the Bible or the Quran:

Appositive

An appositive colon also separates the subtitle of a work from its principal title. Dillon has noted the impact of colons on scholarly articles, but the reliability of colons as a predictor of quality or impact has also been challenged. In titles, neither needs to be a complete sentence as titles do not represent expository writing:

Segmental

Like a dash or quotation mark, a segmental colon introduces speech. The segmental function was once a common means of indicating an unmarked quotation on the same line. The following example is from the grammar book The King's English:
This form is still used in British industry-standard templates for written performance dialogues, such as in a play. The colon indicates that the words following an character's name are spoken by that character.
The uniform visual pattern of <character_nametag : character_spoken_lines> placement on a script page assists an actor in scanning for the lines of their assigned character during rehearsal, especially if a script is undergoing rewrites between rehearsals.

Use of capitals

Use of capitalization or lowercase after a colon varies. In British English, and in most Commonwealth countries, the word following the colon is in lowercase unless it is normally capitalized for some other reason, as with proper nouns and acronyms. British English also capitalizes a new sentence introduced by a colon's [|segmental use].
American English permits writers to similarly capitalize the first word of any independent clause following a colon. This follows the guidelines of some modern American style guides, including those published by the Associated Press and the Modern Language Association. The Chicago Manual of Style, however, requires capitalization only when the colon introduces a direct quotation, a direct question, or two or more complete sentences.
In many European languages, the colon is usually followed by a lowercase letter unless the upper case is required for other reasons, as with British English. German usage requires capitalization of independent clauses following a colon. Dutch further capitalizes the first word of any quotation following a colon, even if it is not a complete sentence on its own.

Spacing and parentheses

In print, a thin space was traditionally placed before a colon and a thick space after it. In modern English-language printing, no space is placed before a colon and a single space is placed after it. In French-language typing and printing, the traditional rules are preserved.
One or two spaces may be and have been used after a colon. The older convention was to use two spaces after a colon.
In modern typography, a colon will be placed outside the closing parenthesis introducing a list. In very early English typography, it could be placed inside, as seen in Roger Williams' 1643 book about the Native American languages of New England.

Usage in other languages

Suffix separator

In Finnish and Swedish, the colon can appear inside words in a manner similar to the apostrophe in the English possessive case, connecting a grammatical suffix to an abbreviation or initialism, a special symbol, or a digit.

Abbreviation mark

Written Swedish uses colons in contractions, such as S:t for Sankt – for example in the name of the Stockholm metro station S:t Eriksplan, and k:a for kyrka – for instance Svenska k:a, the Evangelical Lutheran national Church of Sweden. This can even occur in people's names, for example Antonia Ax:son Johnson. Early Modern English texts also used colons to mark abbreviations.

Word separator

In Ethiopia, both Amharic and Ge'ez script used and sometimes still use a colon-like mark as word separator.
Historically, a colon-like mark was used as a word separator in Old Turkic script.

End of sentence or verse

In Armenian, a colon indicates the end of a sentence, similar to a Latin full stop or period.
In liturgical Hebrew, the sof pasuq is used in some writings such as prayer books to signal the end of a verse.

Score divider

In German, Hebrew, and sometimes in English, a colon divides the scores of opponents in sports and games. A result of 149–0 would be written as 149 : 0 in German and in Hebrew.

Mathematics and logic

The colon is used in mathematics, cartography, model building, and other fields, in this context it denotes a ratio or a scale, as in 3:1.
When a ratio is reduced to a simpler form, such as 10:15 to 2:3, this may be expressed with a double colon as 10:15::2:3; this would be read "10 is to 15 as 2 is to 3". This form is also used in tests of logic where the question of "Dog is to Puppy as Cat is to _____?" can be expressed as "Dog:Puppy::Cat:_____". For these uses, there is a dedicated Unicode symbol that is preferred in some contexts. Compare with 2:3.
In some languages, the colon is the commonly used sign for division.
The notation may also denote the index of a subgroup.
The notation indicates that is a function with domain and codomain.
The combination with an equal sign is used for definitions.
In mathematical logic, when using set-builder notation for describing the characterizing property of a set, it is used as an alternative to a vertical bar, to mean "such that". Example:
In older literature on mathematical logic, it is used to indicate how expressions should be bracketed.
In type theory and programming language theory, the colon sign after a term is used to indicate its type, sometimes as a replacement to the "∈" symbol. Example:
A colon is also sometimes used to indicate a tensor contraction involving two indices, and a double colon for a contraction over four indices.
A colon is also used to denote a parallel sum operation involving two operands.

Computing

The character was on early typewriters and therefore appeared in most text encodings, such as Baudot code and EBCDIC. It was placed at code 58 in ASCII and from there inherited into Unicode. Unicode also defines several related characters:

Programming languages

Many programming languages, most notably ALGOL, Pascal and Ada, use a colon and equals sign as the assignment operator, to distinguish it from a single equals which is an equality test.
Many languages including C and Java use the colon to indicate the text before it is a label, such as a target for a goto or an introduction to a case in a switch statement. In a related use, Python uses a colon to separate a control statement from the block of statements it controls.
In many languages, including JavaScript, colons are used to define name–value pairs in a dictionary or object. This is also used by data formats such as JSON. Some other languages use an equals sign.
The colon is used as part of the ?: conditional operator in C and many other languages.
C++ and Rust use a double colon as the scope resolution operator/namespace qualification, and class member access. This is unlike some other languages, which use periods to do so. Another language using colons for scope resolution is Erlang, which uses a single colon. In C#, the double colon is used to access a member of an aliased namespace. Similarly in Java, the double colon is used to retrieve a method reference.
In BASIC, it is used as a separator between the statements or instructions in a single line. Most other languages use a semicolon, but BASIC had used semicolon to separate items in print statements.
In Forth, a colon precedes definition of a new word.
Haskell uses a colon as an operator to add a data element to the front of a list, while a double colon :: is read as "has type of". The ML languages have the above reversed, where the double colon is used to add an element to the front of a list; and the single colon is used for type guards. Rust, ActionScript, Kotlin, and TypeScript also use a colon to include a type annotation on a function or a variable.
MATLAB uses the colon as a binary operator to generate a vector, or to select a part of an extant matrix.
APL uses the colon:
  • to introduce a control structure element. In this usage it must be the first non-blank character of the line.
  • after a label name that will be the target of a :goto or a right-pointing arrow.
  • to separate a guard from its expression in a dynamic function. Two colons are used for an Error guard.
  • Colon + space are used in class definitions to indicate inheritance.
  • ⍠ is used by APL for its variant operator.
The colon is also used in many operating systems commands.
In the esoteric programming language INTERCAL, the colon is called two-spot and used to label a 32-bit variable, distinct from spot to label a 16-bit variable.

Addresses

Internet URLs use the colon to separate the protocol from the hostname or IP address.
In an IPv6 address, colons separate up to 8 groups of 16 bits in hexadecimal representation. In a URL, a colon follows the initial scheme name and File Transfer Protocol, and separates a port number from the hostname or IP address.
In Microsoft Windows filenames, the colon is reserved for use in alternate data streams and cannot appear in a filename. It was used as the directory separator in Classic Mac OS, and was difficult to use in early versions of the newer BSD-based macOS due to code swapping the slash and colon to try to preserve this usage. In most systems it is often difficult to put a colon in a filename as the shell interprets it for other purposes.
CP/M and early versions of MSDOS required the colon after the names of devices, such as though this gradually disappeared except for disks. This then migrated to use in URLs.

Text markup

It is often used as a single post-fix delimiter, signifying a token keyword had immediately preceded it or the transition from one mode of character string interpretation to another related mode. Some applications, such as the widely used MediaWiki, use the colon as both a pre-fix and post-fix delimiter.
In wiki markup, the colon is often used to indent text. Common usage includes separating or marking comments in a discussion as replies, or to distinguish certain parts of a text.