;
Semicolon
- Unicode
- U+003B
- Category
- Punctuation
- HTML Entity
- ;
- CSS
- \003B
The semicolon (;) is a pause stronger than a comma and weaker than a full stop. It joins two closely related sentences that could stand alone (It rained; we stayed in) and separates items in a list when the items already contain commas. Online it is the winking eye of ;) and ;-). In Greek the same shape is the question mark; Unicode encodes the Greek question mark separately (U+037E), but normalisation turns it into this ordinary semicolon.
On US and UK keyboards the semicolon has its own key right of L; Shift with the same key gives the colon. On iPhone it is on the 123 page, on Android on the ?123 page.
On US and UK keyboards the semicolon has its own key right of L; Shift with the same key gives the colon. On iPhone it is on the 123 page, on Android on the ?123 page.
How to Type
- Windows
- ; key (right of L) · Alt+59
- macOS
- ; key (right of L)
- Linux
- ; key · Ctrl+Shift+U 3b
- HTML
- ;
In Programming
In C, C++, Java, C#, PHP and Rust a semicolon ends a statement. JavaScript inserts missing ones automatically, which occasionally bites (a return followed by a line break returns nothing); in Python it is optional and only joins statements on one line. CSS separates declarations with it, SQL ends statements with it, and Bash uses it to run commands in sequence (cd dir; ls). In HTML a character reference such as & ends with ;.
Tags
semicolon
semi colon
semicolon symbol
semicolon vs comma
wink
alt 59
statement terminator
keyboard symbol
ascii