The Italian printer Aldus Manutius established the practice of using the semicolon mark to separate words of opposed meaning, and to indicate interdependent statements. The earliest, general use of the semicolon in English was in 1591.
Separates items in a list where the list items themselves include commas.
Guests at the summit included David Cameron, the British Prime Minister; Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor; and François Hollande, the French President.
1878, Franz Delitzsch with Neumann, translated by Thomas Rawson Birks, Commentary on the Book of Isaiah[1] (in English), page 247:
The name Θῖναι, Strabo, Σῖναι, Ptol., Τζίνιτζα, Kosmas, did not obtain currency first from the founder of the dynasty Tsin; but, long before this, Tsin was the name of a feudal kingdom in Shensi, one of the western provinces of the Sinese land, and Feitsa, the first feudal King of Tsin, began to reign as early as b.c. 897.
In French, all composite symbols (i.e. ;, :, ! and ?) should be preceded by a non-breaking space, except ! and ? in Canadian French, where no preceding space is needed.
In Greek, this symbol is a question mark, and the role of semicolon is fulfilled by U+0387 ·, the άνω τελεία(áno teleía, “upper stop”).
