English Explanatory Dictionary

comma

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. The punctuation mark ⟨,⟩ used to indicate a set of parts of a sentence or between elements of a list.
  2. A similar-looking subscript diacritical mark.
  3. 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.
  4. A difference in the calculation of nearly identical intervals by different ways.
  5. A delimiting marker between items in a genetic sequence.
  6. 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.
  7. A brief interval.
verb
  1. To place a comma or commas within text; to follow, precede, or surround a portion of text with commas.

Pronunciation

kŏm'ə /ˈkɒmə/ /ˈkɔmə/ [ˈkɑ.mə ~ ˈkɑ.mʌ] En-us-comma.ogg /ˈkɔmɑ/ kə-mä' /kəˈmɑ/

Word forms

comma commas commata commaes come commaing commaed

Etymology

From Latin comma, from Ancient Greek κόμμα (kómma), from κόπτω (kóptō, “to cut”).

Synonyms

scratch comma virgule virgula come comma-point

Related words

apostrophe curly brackets brace square bracket bracket colon dash ellipsis exclamation mark fraction slash guillemet hyphen interpunct interrobang parentheses (US Canada) full stop period question mark quotation marks semicolon slash stroke space

Derived words

comma bacillus comma butterfly comma category commaless comma lichen commalike comma-point comma queen comma splice commify decimal comma Didymean comma dun comma fat comma Harvard comma high comma ideographic comma myocomma Ptolemaic comma scratch-comma Shatner comma
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