The Colon

Presented by:
VICTOR MANUEL MENDOZA UTRILLA LUIS ARTURO OVANDO DOMINGUEZ

 The Colon (:) is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line. As with many other punctuation marks, the usage of colon varies among languages and, within a given language, across historical periods. As a rule, however, a colon informs the reader that the following proves, explains or simply provides elements of what is referred to before.

The following classification of the functions that a colon may have, given by Luca Serianni (a pioneer of the colon) for Italian usage, is generally valid for English and many other languages:

syntactical-deductive: introduces the logical consequence, or effect, of a fact stated before

There was only one possible explanation: the train had never arrived.

syntactical-descriptive: introduces a descriptionin particular, makes explicit the elements of a set

I have three sisters: Catherine, Sarah, and Mary.

appositive: introduces a sentence with the role of apposition with respect to the previous one Luruns could not speak: he was drunk.

 segmental: introduces a direct speech, in combination with quotation marks and dashes. The segmental function was once a common means of indicating an unmarked quotation on the same line. The following example is from Fowler's grammar book, The Kings English:
Benjamin Franklin proclaimed the virtue of frugality: a penny saved is a penny earned. It is commonly used to replace quotes in a dialogue: Patient: Doctor, I feel like a pair of curtains. Doctor: Pull yourself together!

A colon may also be used for the following:

Introduction of a definition
Hypernym of a word: a word having a wider meaning than the given one; e.g., hypernym of automobile vehicle is a

Separation of the chapter and the verse number(s)

John 3:1416 (or John III:1416) (cf. chapters and verses of the Bible)

In American English , the separation of hours, minutes and seconds when reporting the time of day The concert finished at 23:45
This file was last modified today at 11:15:05

Separation of a title and the corresponding subtitle

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

Use of capitalization or lower-case after a colon varies. In British English, the word following the colon is in lower case unless it is a proper noun or an acronym, or if it is normally capitalized for some other reason.

Abbreviation
The colon is used to abbreviate Sankt (Swedish for "Saint"), rendering it as S:t, such as in the Stockholm Metro station S:t Eriksplan.

 The colon is also used as a grammatical tone letter in Budu in the Congo-Kinshasa, in Sabaot in Kenya, in some Grebo in Liberia, and in Papua New Guinea: Erima, Gizra, Go bosi, Gwahatike.

Mathematics and logic

The colon is used in mathematics, cartography, model building and other fields to denote a ratio or a scale, as in 3:1 (pronounced three to one). When a ratio is reduced to a simpler form, such as 10:15 to 2:3, this may be expressed with a double colon as 10:15::2:3; this would be read "10 is to 15 as 2 is to 3".

 The colon is quite often used as a special control character in URLs, computer programming languages, in the path representation of several file systems (such as HFS), and in many operating systems commands.

Internet usage
 On the Internet, a colon, or multiple colons, is sometimes used to denote an action or to emote. In this use it has the inverse function of quotation marks, denoting actions where unmarked text is assumed to be dialogue. For example:
Tom: Pluto is so small; it should not be considered a planet. It is tiny! Mark: Oh really? ::Drops Pluto on Toms head:: Still think its small now?