Trim the sentence containing colon and period to extract a word in between

Hello All ,
i am a newbie in korn shell scripting trying to trim a sentence that is parsed into a variable . The format of the sentence has three words that are separated from other by a
" : " colon and "." period . Format of the sentence looks like

sampleword:sampleword.sampleword

The result should contain the word that is in between the " : " and period "." in the sentence that should be sent to the variable.

Can anyone help me with scripting this scenario.

Thank you

Venu

$ echo sampleword1:sampleword2.sampleword3 | awk -F[:.] '{print $2}'
sampleword2

var2=${var1%.*}
echo "${var2#*:}"

echo sampleword:sampleword.sampleword  |cut -d: -f2 |cut -d. -f1

$ echo sampleword1:samplewor2.sampleword3 | awk 'NR==var' var=2 RS=[:.]
samplewor2

My sincere thanks to all of you folks ......worked fantastic........