Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels, and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs.
A dagger, obelisk, or obelus† is a typographical mark that usually indicates a footnote if an asterisk has already been used. The symbol is also used to indicate death or extinction. It is one of the modern descendants of the obelus, a mark used historically by scholars as a critical or highlighting indicator in manuscripts. In older texts, it is called an obelisk.
In typography, the pilcrow (¶) is a glyph used to identify a paragraph. In editorial production the pilcrow typographic character may also be known as the paragraph mark, the paragraph sign, the paragraph symbol, the paraph, and the blind P.
In punctuation, a word divider is a form of glyph which separates written words. In languages which use the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as other scripts of Europe and West Asia, the word divider is a blank space, or whitespace. This convention is spreading, along with other aspects of European punctuation, to Asia and Africa, where words are usually written without word separation.
An interpunct·, also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages.
The section sign (§) is a typographical character for referencing individually numbered sections of a document; it is frequently used when citing sections of a legal code. It is also known as the section symbol, section mark, double-s, or silcrow. In other languages it may be called the "paragraph symbol".
An underscore or underline is a line drawn under a segment of text. In proofreading, underscoring is a convention that says "set this text in italic type", traditionally used on manuscript or typescript as an instruction to the printer. Its use to add emphasis in modern finished documents is generally avoided.
Hexapla, also called Origenis Hexaplorum, is a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible in six versions, four of them translated into Greek, preserved only in fragments. It was an immense and complex word-for-word comparison of the original Hebrew Scriptures with the Greek Septuagint translation and with other Greek translations. The term especially and generally applies to the edition of the Old Testament compiled by the theologian and scholar Origen sometime before 240.
A coronis is a textual symbol found in ancient Greek papyri that was used to mark the end of an entire work or of a major section in poetic and prose texts. The coronis was generally placed in the left-hand margin of the text and was often accompanied by a paragraphos or a forked paragraphos.
A paragraphos was a mark in ancient Greek punctuation, marking a division in a text or drawing the reader's attention to another division mark, such as the two dot punctuation mark ⁚.
The hypodiastole, also known as a diastole, was an interpunct developed in late Ancient and Byzantine Greek texts before the separation of words by spaces was common. In the scriptio continua then used, a group of letters might have separate meanings as a single word or as a pair of words. The papyrological hyphen showed a group of letters should be read together as a single word, and the hypodiastole showed that they should be taken separately. Compare "ὅ,τι" ("whatever") to "ὅτι" ("...that...").
Diple was a mark used in the margins of ancient Greek manuscripts to draw attention to something in the text. It is sometimes also called antilambda because the sign resembles a Greek capital letter lambda turned upon its side. In some ways its usage was similar to modern day quotation marks; guillemets (« »), used for quotations in French, are derived from it.
The orthography of the Greek language ultimately has its roots in the adoption of the Greek alphabet in the 9th century BC. Some time prior to that, one early form of Greek, Mycenaean, was written in Linear B, although there was a lapse of several centuries between the time Mycenaean stopped being written and the time when the Greek alphabet came into use.
A dele or deleatur is an obelism used to mark something for deletion.
An obelisk is a tall, four-sided monument.
The manicule, ☛, is a typographic mark with the appearance of a hand with its index finger extending in a pointing gesture. Originally used for handwritten marginal notes, it later came to be used in printed works to draw the reader's attention to important text. Though once widespread, it is rarely used today, except as an occasional archaic novelty or on informal directional signs.
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography, which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography, introduced in 1982, corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics.
The tie is a symbol in the shape of an arc similar to a large breve, used in Greek, phonetic alphabets, and Z notation. It can be used between two characters with spacing as punctuation, non-spacing as a diacritic, or (underneath) as a proofreading mark. It can be above or below, and reversed. Its forms are called tie, double breve, enotikon or papyrological hyphen, ligature tie, and undertie.
Aristarchian symbols are editorial marks developed during the Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire for annotating then-ancient Greek texts—mainly the works of Homer. They were used to highlight missing text, text which was discrepant between sources, and text which appeared in the wrong place.
An obelus is a term in codicology and latterly in typography that refers to a historical annotation mark which has resolved to three modern meanings:
The coronis marked subsections.
The paragraphos was used for breaks.
The hypodiastole separated words before the use of spaces.
The dotted diple was also used for dubious lines.
