Etymology

semicolon

sem·i·col·on
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Today it means: The punctuation mark ";", which is used to separate two sentences, the latter of which qualifies the former; to separate a series of related clauses or sentences; to separate items in a list where the items themselves include commas; etc. Full definition →

English colon ← Latin cōlon ← Ancient Greek κῶλον (kôlon)
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The story

  1. Proto-Indo-European*sem-
  2. Proto-Indo-European*sēmi
  3. Latinsēmi-
  4. Englishsemi-
  5. Ancient Greekκῶλον (kôlon)
  6. Latincōlon
  7. Englishcolon
  8. English todaysemicolon

From semi- (“half”) + colon, from the fact that the mark is a colon (“:”) with the lower half replaced by a comma (“,”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.