From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Punctuation \Punc'tu*a"tion\, noun [Cf. F. ponctuation.] (Gram.) The act or art of punctuating or pointing a writing or discourse; the art or mode of dividing literary composition into sentences, and members of a sentence, by means of points, so as to elucidate the author's meaning.
Note: Punctuation, as the term is usually understood, is chiefly performed with four points: the period [.], the colon [:], the semicolon [;], and the comma [,]. Other points used in writing and printing, partly rhetorical and partly grammatical, are the note of interrogation [?], the note of exclamation [!], the parentheses [()], the dash [--], and brackets []. It was not until the 16th century that an approach was made to the present system of punctuation by the Manutii of Venice. With Caxton, oblique strokes took the place of commas and periods.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
noun
1: something that makes repeated and regular interruptions or divisions
2: the marks used to clarify meaning by indicating separation of words into sentences and clauses and phrases [syn: {punctuation mark}]
3: the use of certain marks to clarify meaning of written material by grouping words grammatically into sentences and clauses and phrases
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
36 Moby Thesaurus words for "punctuation": alphabet, ampersand, angle brackets, apostrophe, braces, colon, comma, dash, decimal point, diacritical mark, diagonal, dot, ellipsis, end stop, exclamation mark, full stop, hyphen, letter, parens, parentheses, period, point, punctuation marks, question mark, quotation marks, quotes, reference, reference mark, semicolon, single quotes, solidus, stop, tittle, virgule, writing system, written character
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