About this video
Paige explains the colon's third function: separating. A colon separates a title from its subtitle, a chapter number from a verse number in citations (like 1 Corinthians 13:4), and the hour from the minutes in a time (like 10:09).
You'll be able to
- use a colon between a title and a subtitle.
- use a colon in a citation such as a Bible chapter and verse.
- use a colon to write the time of day.
Key words
- colon
- A punctuation mark ( : ) that can link, introduce or separate.
- subtitle
- A second part of a title that adds more detail, after a colon.
- citation
- A reference that tells exactly where something comes from, like a chapter and verse.
Transcript
- [Voiceover] Hello grammarians. So today we're gonna talk about third and final function of the colon. So this final function of the colon is that it can be used as a separator. So it might sound like we're talking about the comma again, right? The comma separates elements of a sentence.
But the colon does it in kind of a different way. So, let's look at some examples. So one common use of the colon as a separator is in titles. So you can have two separate parts of the title, or like a title and a subtitle for a book or a movie or a TV show. And there will be a colon in between them.
We can have something like Bear Man: Adventures in Alaska. Another common use of the colon as a separator is in citations from a book or a poem, and pretty often the Bible. For example, we can use it to separate the number of a Bible chapter from the number of the verse.
If we want to reference First Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verse four, we can write it like One Corinthians 13 colon four. Finally, we can use the colon to separate the hour from the minutes in the time of day. If I want to tell someone what time it is, I can say it is now ten-oh-nine AM.
And between the ten, which is the hour of the day, and oh-nine, which is the minutes, we put a colon. So that's how the colon works as a separator. We can use it in titles, citations, and times. You can learn anything. Paige out.
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