This tables lists names used to refer more handily to puntuation marks. The English names are drawn from Tables 7 through 9 of ISO 646, an international character set standard.
| Mark | English names | Real names |
|---|---|---|
| ! | Exclamation mark | bang |
| @ | Commercial at-sign | at, strudel |
| # | Number sign (may show up as pounds sterling), Pound sign), octothorpe | hash, sharp, pound |
| $ | Dollar sign (may show up as the generic "Currency sign") | dollar, ding |
| % | Percent sign | mod, grapes |
| ^ | Circumflex | caret, up |
| & | Ampersand | amp, and |
| * | Asterisk | splat |
| ( | Left parenthesis | left paren, open |
| ) | Right parenthesis | right paren, close |
| [ | Left square bracket | lbracket, lsquib |
| ] | Right square bracket | rbracket, rsquib |
| { | Left curly bracket | lbrace |
| } | Right curly bracket | rbrace |
| / | Solidus or forward slash | slash |
| \ | Reverse solidus | backslash, slosh |
| < | Less-than sign | lt |
| > | Greater-than sign | gt |
| | | Vertical line | pipe, bar, or, or-bar, vbar |
| ' | Apostrophe | pop, s-quo |
| " | Quotation mark | d-pop, d-quo |
| . | Full stop, period, point | dot |
| , | Comma | comma |
| : | Colon | colon |
| ; | Semicolon | semi |
| ? | Question mark | eh |
| + | Plus sign | plus |
| - | Hyphen, minus sign (in real typography these are not the same) | dash |
| _ | Low line, underline, or underscore | under, score, skid |
| = | Equals sign | eq |
| ~ | Tilde, overline | twiddle |
| ` | Grave accent | backpop |
| w | double-u | wub |
Thorough use of the shortest names can lead to interesting conversations, especially when writing Unix shell scripts.
See also the "Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide" and The Hackers Dictionary, available at various sites.