Pronunciation Noun
comma (plural commas)
- (typography) The punctuation mark ⟨,⟩ used to indicate a set off parts of a sentence or between elements of a list.
- Synonyms: scratch comma, virgule, virgula, come, comma-point
- hypo en
- 1828, Richard Thomson, Illustrations of the History of Great Britain, Vol. II ↗, pp. 145–6 ↗:
- No points were used by the ancient printers, excepting the colon and the period; but, after some time, a short oblique stroke, called a virgil, was introduced, which answered to the modern comma. In the fifteenth century this punctuation was improved by the famous Aldus Manutius with the typographical art in general; when he gave a better shape to the comma, added the semicolon, and assigned to the former points more proper places.
- (Romanian typography) A similar-looking subscript diacritical mark.
- (entomology) Any of various nymphalid butterflies of the genus Polygonia, having a comma-shaped white mark on the underwings, especially Polygonia c-album and Polygonia c-aureum of North Africa, Europe, and Asia.
- (music) A difference in the calculation of nearly identical intervals by different ways.
- (genetics) A delimiting marker between items in a genetic sequence.
- (rhetoric) In Ancient Greek rhetoric, a short clause, something less than a colon, originally denoted by comma marks. In antiquity it was defined as a combination of words having no more than eight syllables in all. It was later applied to longer phrases, e.g. the Johannine comma.
- (figurative) A brief interval.
- French: virgule
- German: Beistrich, Komma qual also denotes the German or Fraktur comma with a shape similar to /
- Italian: virgola
- Portuguese: vírgula
- Russian: запята́я
- Spanish: coma
- German: C-Falter
comma (commas, present participle commaing; past and past participle commaed)
- (rare, transitive) To place a comma or commas within text; to [[follow, precede, or surround a portion of text with commas.]]
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