2089: Original Meaning of Comma, Period, and Colon | Sep 3, 2020

Today, commas, periods, and colons are all terms for punctuation, but this was not any of their original senses, looking back at those words’ histories. Indeed, all of them were rhetorical terms or used for poetry. A comma in Latin referred to a short phrase, line of a poem, or a clause of a sentence; period referred a complete sentence or “full pause”, and colon just referred to a part of a poem, and comes from Greek, literally ‘limb’. Of those, ‘colon’ has likely changed the most, as it referred to far more substantial divisions than it does now.

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