Semicolon

The semicolon; (or semi-colon) is a symbol commonly used as orthographicpunctuation. In the English language, a semicolon is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought, such as when restating the preceding idea with a different expression. When a semicolon joins two or more ideas in one sentence, those ideas are then given equal rank. Semicolons can also be used in place of commas to separate items in a list, particularly when the elements of the list themselves have embedded commas.

The semicolon is one of the least understood of the standard marks, and is not frequently used by many English speakers.

In the QWERTYkeyboard layout, the semicolon resides in the unshiftedhomerow beneath the little finger of the right hand. It has become widely used in programming languages as a statement separator or terminator.