PUNCTUATION • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Punctuation

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/pˌəŋktʃuˈeɪʃən/ Listen

noun

Punctuation n. (Gram.) The act or art of punctuating or pointing a writing or discourse; the art or mode of dividing literary composition into sentences, and members of a sentence, by means of points, so as to elucidate the author's meaning. Note: Punctuation, as the term is usually understood, is chiefly performed with four points: the period (.), the colon (:), the semicolon (;), and the comma (,). Other points used in writing and printing, partly rhetorical and partly grammatical, are the note of interrogation (?), the note of exclamation (!), the parentheses (()), the dash (), and brackets (). It was not until the 16th century that an approach was made to the present system of punctuation by the Manutii of Venice. With Caxton, oblique strokes took the place of commas and periods.

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Etymology of 'Punctuation'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Punctuation" Quotes from Famous Books

... Punctuation teaches the method of placing Points, in written or printed matter, in such a manner as to indicate the pauses which would be made by the author if he were communicating his thoughts orally ...

— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... It was to end in elopement, post-chaise, clandestine marriage, in right eighteenth-century. Here it is in an earlier state, all mortification, pouting and hunching of the shoulder. I reproduce it with Maria's punctuation, which shows it to have proceeded, as no doubt she ...

— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... carefully in punctuation and paragraphing: spelling also; and, with an occasional direction in regard to such matters, she ...

— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley

... 'so,' and even, as in this instance, the preferable substitute. We should have written 'as' in both places probably, but at all events in the latter, transplacing the sentences 'as secret though not so killing;' or 'not so killing, but quite as secret.' It is not generally true that Taylor's punctuation is arbitrary, or his periods reducible to the post-Revolutionary standard of length by turning some of his colons or semi-colons into full stops. There is a subtle yet just and systematic logic followed in ...

— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... of all extracts from the elder writers has been modernized, and their punctuation rendered more distinct; in other respects reliance may be placed on ...

— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

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