Emily Dickinson Lexicon

PUNC-TU-A'TION, n.

In grammar, the act or art of pointing a writing or discourse, or the act or art of marking with points the divisions of a discourse into sentences and clauses or members of a sentence. Punctuation is performed by four points, the period (.); the colon (:); the semi-colon (;); and the comma (,). The ancients were unacquainted with punctuation; they wrote without any distinction of members, periods, or words.