punctuation
punctuation marks —
the period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, semicolon, colon, em dash, en dash, hyphen, parentheses, brackets, braces, apostrophe, double quotation marks, single quotation marks, and ellipsis
| punctuation mark | name | example | |
. | full stop or period | I like English. | |
, | comma | I speak English, French and Thai. | |
; | semicolon | I don’t often go swimming; I prefer to play tennis. | |
: | colon | You have two choices: finish the work today or lose the contract. | |
– | hyphen | This is a rather out-of-date book. | |
s_ | dash | In each town—London, Paris and Rome—we stayed in youth hostels. | |
? | question mark | Where is Shangri-La? | |
! | exclamation mark exclamation point (AmE) | “Help!” she cried. “I can’t swim!” | |
/ | slash, forward slash or oblique | Please press your browser’s Refresh/Reload button. | |
! | backslash | C:\Files\jo.doc | |
“ | double quotation marks | “I love you,” she said. | |
‘ | single quotation marks | ‘I love you,’ she said. | |
‘s | apostrophe | This is John’s car. | |
____ | underline | Have you read Harry Potter? | |
_ | underscore | b_l@cia.gov | |
() | round brackets | I went to Bangkok (my favourite city) and stayed there for two weeks. | |
[] | square brackets | The newspaper reported that the hostages [most of them French] had been released. | |
… | ellipsis mark | One happy customer wrote: “This is the best program…that I have ever seen.” |