Semicolon  The semicolon or semi-colon is a symbol commonly used as orthographic punctuation. In the English language, a "semicolon" can be used between two closely related independent clauses, provided they are not already joined by a coordinating conjunction. Semicolons can also be used in place of commas to separate the items in a list, particularly when the elements of that list contain commas. The first printed semicolon was the work of the Italian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder in 1494. Manutius established the practice of using the semicolon to separate words of opposed meaning and to allow a rapid change in direction in connecting interdependent statements. Ben Jonson was the first notable English writer to use the semicolon systematically. The modern uses of the semicolon relate either to the listing of items or to the linking of related clauses. Although terminal marks (i.e. full stops, exclamation marks, and question marks) indicate the end of a sentence, the comma, semicolon, and colon are normally sentence-internal, making them secondary boundary marks. The semicolon falls between terminal marks and the comma; its strength is equal to that of the colon. Semicolons are followed by a lower case letter, unless that letter would ordinarily be capitalized mid-sentence (e.g., the word "I", acronyms/initialisms, or proper nouns). In older English printed texts, colons and semicolons are offset from the preceding word by a non-breaking space, a convention still current in present-day continental French texts. Ideally, the space is less wide than the inter-word spaces. Some guides recommend separation by a hair space. Modern style guides recommend no space before them and one space after. They also typically recommend placing semicolons outside ending quotation marks, although this was not always the case. For example, the first edition of "The Chicago Manual of Style" (1906) recommended placing the semicolon inside ending quotation marks. Applications of the semicolon in English include:  In Arabic, the semicolon is called "Fasila Manqoota" () which means literally "a dotted comma", and is written inverted . In Arabic, the semicolon has several uses:  In Greek and Church Slavonic, a semicolon indicates a question, similar to a Latin question mark. To indicate a long pause or separate sections, each with commas (the semicolon's purpose in English), Greek uses, but extremely rarely, the , an interpunct .