Questions tagged [punctuation]

Punctuation marks, in Chinese 标点符号, are graphic marks used in writing to clarify the meaning of sentences.

Many punctuation marks in Chinese have direct matches in English, albeit many of them actually correspond to different Unicode code points, due to spacing conventions. For example:

• full stop . and 句号 。
• comma , and 逗号 ，
• semicolon ; and 分号 ；

Some punctuation marks exist only in Chinese. For example:

• 顿号 、
• 引号 「 and 」
• 间隔号 · (central dot, used to separate parts of non-Chinese names)

Finally, some punctuation marks exist in both languages but have different usage:

• dash — used to mark parenthetical sentences and 连接好 — used to connect two elements (e.g. dates 1950—2010 = from 1950 to 2010)

Use this tag for questions about punctuation marks.

If your question concerns different notation marks, use [notations] instead.

If your question concerns characters or diacritics used in romanization systems, use the appropriate tag, as [pinyin], [zhuyin-fuhao], etc.