The colon in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 2 and 5, a horizontal pair across the middle of the cell.

It is the letter c moved down a row

Take the cell for c and slide every dot down one position — dot 1 becomes dot 2, dot 4 becomes dot 5 — and you have the colon. Six of the eight single-cell marks were built this way, which means a reader who knows the first ten letters already knows the shapes and only has to remember they sit lower in the cell.

In a sentence

Here is the colon doing its job, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.

You need three things: paper, a slate and a stylus.

Try your own text in the translator, or paste braille into the decoder to read it back.

Marks it is confused with

These differ by a single dot. Punctuation is harder to tell apart than letters because the marks are small and sit low in the cell, so a missing dot is easy to miss.