Colon (letter)

<p>The colon alphabetic letter ꞉ is used in a number of languages and phonetic transcription systems, for <a href="/facts/Vowel_length/BhBqJJu3">vowel length</a> in <a href="/facts/Americanist_phonetic_notation/ozMFd3Rl">Americanist Phonetic Notation</a>, for the vowels ⟨a꞉⟩ [ɛ] and ⟨o꞉⟩ [ɔ] in a number of languages of Papua New Guinea, and for grammatical <a href="/facts/Tone_(phonology)/eprhXrWJ">tone</a> in several languages of Africa. It resembles but differs from the <a href="/facts/Colon_(punctuation)/se9fjJa4">colon punctuation mark</a>, :. In some fonts, the two dots are placed a bit closer together than those of the punctuation colon so that the two characters are visually distinct. 
In <a href="/facts/Unicode/DDu3MfPV">Unicode</a> it has been assigned the code U+A789 ꞉ MODIFIER LETTER COLON, which behaves like a letter rather than a punctuation mark in electronic texts. In practice, however, an <a href="/facts/ASCII/vGUI33Qu">ASCII</a> colon is frequently used for the letter (U+003A : COLON).
</p><p>In <a href="/facts/Windows/bwhAhuSL">Windows</a> and <a href="/facts/MacOS/Y93vVpTm">macOS</a>, the letter colon can be used to emulate the punctuation colon in file names, where the punctuation colon is a reserved character that cannot be used.
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Colon (letter) open-in-new

Colon (letter)