1.
Dingbat
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In typography, a dingbat is an ornament, character, or spacer used in typesetting, often employed for the creation of box frames. The term continues to be used in the industry to describe fonts that have symbols. Examples of characters included in Unicode, The advent of Unicode, such fonts are also sometimes known as pi fonts. Some of the symbols have been used as signature marks. The Dingbats block was added to the Unicode Standard in June 1993 and this code block contains decorative character variants, and other marks of emphasis and non-textual symbolism. Most of its characters were taken from Zapf Dingbats, the Dingbats block has four emoji that represent people or body parts.0. This code block contains ornamental leaves, punctuation, and ampersands, quilt squares and it is a subset of dingbat fonts Webdings, Wingdings, and Wingdings 2
2.
Apostrophe
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The apostrophe character is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English it is used for several purposes, The marking of the omission of one or more letters, the marking of plurals of individual characters. Apostrophe comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος, through Latin and French, the apostrophe looks the same as a closing single quotation mark, although they have different meanings. Such incorrect substitutes as ´ and are common in unprofessional texts, the apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna. It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice, introduced by Geoffroy Tory, the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision. It was also used in place of a final e when it was elided before a vowel. Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure, from the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision or because the letter no longer represented a sound. English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings and the noun ending -es, so apostrophe followed by s was often used to mark a plural, especially when the noun was a loan word. The use of elision has continued to the present day, but significant changes have made to the possessive. By the 18th century, apostrophe + s was used for all possessive singular forms. This was regarded as representing the Old English genitive singular inflection -es, the plural use was greatly reduced, but a need was felt to mark possessive plural. The solution was to use an apostrophe after the plural s, however, this was not universally accepted until the mid-19th century. The apostrophe is used to indicate possession and this convention distinguishes possessive singular forms from simple plural forms, and both of those from possessive plural forms. For singulars, the possessive or genitive inflection is a survival from certain genitive inflections in Old English. Summary of rules for most situations Possessive personal pronouns, serving as either noun-equivalents or adjective-equivalents, do not use an apostrophe, even when they end in s. The complete list of those ending in the s or the corresponding sound /s/ or /z/ but not taking an apostrophe is ours, yours, his, hers, its, theirs. Other pronouns, singular nouns not ending in s, and plural nouns not ending in s all take ’s in the possessive, e. g. someone’s, a cat’s toys, women’s. Plural nouns already ending in s take only an apostrophe after the s when the possessive is formed
3.
Dash
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The dash is a punctuation mark that is similar to a hyphen or minus sign, but differs from both of these symbols primarily in length and function. Glitter, felt, yarn, and buttons—his kitchen looked as if a clown had exploded, a flock of sparrows—some of them juveniles—alighted and sang. The en dash indicates spans or differentiation, where it may be considered to replace and or to, The French and Indian War was fought in western Pennsylvania and along the present US–Canada border. —Mahatma Gandhi There are several forms of dash, of which the most common are, Less common are the dash and three-em dash. The figure dash is so named because it is the width as a digit. This is true of most fonts, not only monospaced fonts, the figure dash is used when a dash must be used within numbers. It does not indicate a range, for which the en dash is used, nor does it function as the minus sign, the figure dash is often unavailable, in this case, one may use a hyphen-minus instead. In Unicode, the dash is U+2012. HTML authors must use the numeric forms ‒, or ‒, to type it unless the file is in Unicode, there is no equivalent character entity. In TeX, the fonts have no figure dash, however. In XeLaTeX, one could use \char2012, the en dash, n dash, n-rule, or nut is traditionally half the width of an em dash. In modern fonts, the length of the en dash is not standardized, the widths of en and em dashes have also been specified as being equal to those of the upper-case letters N and M respectively, and at other times to the widths of the lower-case letters. This may include such as those between dates, times, or numbers. Various style guides restrict this range indication style to only parenthetical or tabular matter, for example, APA style uses an en dash in ranges, but AMA style uses a hyphen. Various style guides recommend that when a number range might be misconstrued as subtraction, the word to should be used instead of an en dash. For example, a voltage of 50 V to 100 V is preferable to using a voltage of 50–100 V. Relatedly, in ranges that include negative numbers, to is used to avoid ambiguity or awkwardness. It is also considered poor style to use the en dash in place of the words to or and in phrases that follow the forms from X to Y, the en dash can also be used to contrast values, or illustrate a relationship between two things. Examples of this include, Australia beat American Samoa 31–0
4.
Exclamation mark
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The exclamation mark or exclamation point is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume, and often marks the end of a sentence. Similarly, an exclamation mark is often used in warning signs. Other uses include, In mathematics it denotes the factorial operation, at the beginning of an expression to denote logical negation, e. g. A means the logical negation of A, also called not A. Graphically the exclamation mark is represented as a stop point with a vertical line above. One theory of its origin is that it is derived from a Latin exclamation of joy, the modern graphical representation is believed to have been born in the Middle Ages. Medieval copyists wrote the Latin word io at the end of a sentence to indicate joy, over time, the i moved above the o, and the o became smaller, becoming a point. The exclamation mark did not have its own dedicated key on standard manual typewriters before the 1970s, instead, one typed a period, backspaced, and typed an apostrophe. In the 1950s, secretarial dictation and typesetting manuals in America referred to the mark as bang, appeared in dialogue balloons to represent a gun being fired, although the nickname probably emerged from letterpress printing. This bang usage is behind the names of the interrobang, an unconventional character, and a shebang line. In the printing world, the mark can be called a screamer, a gasper. In hacker culture, the mark is called bang, shriek, or, in the British slang known as Commonwealth Hackish. For example, the password communicated in the spoken phrase Your password is em-nought-pee-aitch-pling-en-three is m0ph. n3, the exclamation mark is common to languages using the Latin alphabet, although usage varies slightly between languages. The exclamation mark was adopted in languages written in other scripts, such as Greek, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Devanagari. A sentence ending in an exclamation mark may be an exclamation, or an imperative, or may indicate astonishment or surprise, They were the footprints of a gigantic hound. Exclamation marks are occasionally placed mid-sentence with a similar to a comma, for dramatic effect, although this usage is obsolescent, On the walk. Informally, exclamation marks may be repeated for emphasis. The exclamation mark is used in conjunction with the question mark. This can be in protest or astonishment, a few writers replace this with a single, nonstandard punctuation mark, the interrobang, which is the combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark
