The colon (:) is a punctuation mark, simply consisting of two equally sized and vertically aligned dots.
A colon is a more significant pause than a semicolon. It is usually used to contrast two parts of a sentence:
The colon's first appearance in English text is marked by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as 1589.
A special double-triangle colon symbol is used in IPA to indicate that the preceding sound is long. Its form is that of two triangles, each a bit larger than a point of a standard colon, pointing toward each other. It is available in Unicode as modifier letter triangular colon, Unicode U+02D0 (ː). A regular colon is often used as a fallback when this character is not available, or in the practical orthography of some languages (particularly in Mexico), which have a phonemic long/short distinction in vowels.
The colon is also used in mathematics, cartography, model building and other fields to denote a ratio or a scale, as in 3:1 (pronounced "three to one"). A betting odd of the form corresponds to the probability . Unicode provides a distinct ratio character, Unicode U+2236 (∶) for mathematical usage.
In many non-English-speaking countries, the colon is used as a division sign: "a divided by b" is written as a : b.
The combination with an equal sign, , is used for definitions.
In computing, the colon character is represented by ASCII code 58, and is located at Unicode code-point U+003A. The full-width (double-byte) equivalent, :, is located at Unicode code point U+FF1A.
The colon is quite often used as a special control character in many operating systems commands, URLs, computer programming languages, and in the path representation of several file systems. It is often used as a single post-fix delimiter, signifying the immediate precedence of a token keyword 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.
For a double-colon, "::" the meaning has included the use of ellipsis, as spanning over omitted text; however, there have been other meanings as well.
On the Internet (online chats, email, message boards, etc.), a colon or multiple colons is sometimes used to denote an action or emote. In this use, it has the inverse function of quotation marks—denoting actions where unmarked text is assumed to be dialog. For example:
Colons may also be used for sounds (as with ":Click:"). One can contrast this use with the use of outer asterisks (for example, *cough* would denote that the speaker is coughing, as opposed to saying the word 'cough').
It also has the widespread usage of representing two vertically aligned eyes in a emoticon, such as :-), :( :P, :D, :3, etc
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