How to type Semicolon
; is the ; key, in the same place on US and UK keyboards. Alt + 59 on the numeric keypad produces it on any Windows layout, which is the way in when the keyboard in front of you has no key for it, and ; writes it in HTML. Its codepoint is U+003B.
Semicolon
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+003B
- Windows
- Alt + 59
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 59 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| HTML | ; | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+003B | SEMICOLON |
Other punctuation symbols
; lives in the Basic Latin block (U+0000-U+007F), the original ASCII set: the letters, digits and punctuation printed on a US keyboard. Within Unicode it is classified as Po, a punctuation mark.
What Semicolon is used for
In mathematical notation ; is punctuation: it takes a space after it and none before, the same as a comma in a sentence. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\mathsemicolon$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for ; in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and it is semi-colon. That word is what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Semicolon is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches it as well as the Unicode name.
What Unicode says about Semicolon
Unicode annotates ; directly. Against U+003B the code chart carries the note “This, and not 037E, is the preferred character for "Greek question mark"”. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.
The code chart points from ; to greek question mark (U+037E), arabic semicolon (U+061B), reversed semicolon (U+204F) and turned semicolon (U+2E35). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Semicolon looks nearly right but not quite.
How Semicolon behaves in software
; takes one column in a terminal. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
Every way to write Semicolon
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+003B |
| Decimal | 59 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 3B |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 3B |
| HTML entity | ; |
| HTML numeric | ; or ; |
| CSS | \003B |
| JavaScript | \u003B |
| Python | \u003B |
| URL-encoded | %3B |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\mathsemicolon$ |
| SVG | 003B.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ; needs escaping
; is one byte in ASCII, in UTF-8 and in every code page in common use, so it never arrives corrupted. Its problem is the opposite one: it means something to the software reading it. In HTML it can be written ;, in a URL it is %3B, and inside a CSV field, a shell command or a regular expression it has to be quoted or escaped rather than typed plainly. That is also why ; is the character people substitute when the one they wanted will not type.