Full stop
The full stop (Commonwealth English), period (North American English), or full point . is a punctuation mark used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence (as distinguished from a question or exclamation).[a]
This article is about the punctuation mark. For other uses, see Full stop (disambiguation). For other uses of the term "period", see Period (disambiguation)..
Period
A full stop is frequently used at the end of word abbreviations—in British usage, primarily truncations like Rev., but not after contractions like Revd; in American English, it is used in both cases.It may be placed after an initial letter used to abbreviate a word. It is often placed after each individual letter in acronyms and initialisms (e.g. "U.S.A."). However, the use of full stops after letters in an initialism or acronym is declining, and many of these without punctuation have become accepted norms (e.g., "UK" and "NATO").[b]
The mark is also used to indicate omitted characters or, in a series as an ellipsis (... or …), to indicate omitted words.
In the English-speaking world, a punctuation mark identical to the full stop is used as the decimal separator and for other purposes, and may be called a point. In computing, it is called a dot.[2] It is sometimes called a baseline dot to distinguish it from the interpunct (or middle dot).[2][3]
History
Ancient Greek origin
The full stop symbol derives from the Greek punctuation introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the 3rd century BCE. In his system, there were a series of dots whose placement determined their meaning.
The practice in the United States and Canada is to place full stops and commas inside quotation marks in most styles.[35] In the British system, which is also called "logical quotation",[36] full stops and commas are placed according to grammatical sense:[35][37] This means that when they are part of the quoted material, they should be placed inside, and otherwise should be outside. For example, they are placed outside in the cases of words-as-words, titles of short-form works, and quoted sentence fragments.
There is some national crossover. The American style is common in British fiction writing.[38] The British style is sometimes used in American English. For example, The Chicago Manual of Style recommends it for fields where comma placement could affect the meaning of the quoted material, such as linguistics and textual criticism.[39][40]
The use of placement according to logical or grammatical sense, or "logical convention", now the more common practice in regions other than North America,[41] was advocated in the influential book The King's English by Fowler and Fowler, published in 1906. Prior to the influence of this work, the typesetter's or printer's style, or "closed convention", now also called American style, was common throughout the world.
There have been a number of practices relating to the spacing after a full stop. Some examples are listed below:
In text messages
Researchers from Binghamton University performed a small study, published in 2016, on young adults and found that text messages that included sentences ended with full stops—as opposed to those with no terminal punctuation—were perceived as insincere, though they stipulated that their results apply only to this particular medium of communication: "Our sense was, is that because [text messages] were informal and had a chatty kind of feeling to them, that a period may have seemed stuffy, too formal, in that context," said head researcher Cecelia Klin.[52] The study did not find handwritten notes to be affected.[53]
A 2016 story by Jeff Guo in The Washington Post stated that the line break had become the default method of punctuation in texting, comparable to the use of line breaks in poetry, and that a period at the end of a sentence causes the tone of the message to be perceived as cold, angry or passive-aggressive.[54]
According to Gretchen McCulloch, an internet linguist, using a full stop to end messages is seen as "rude" by more and more people. She said this can be attributed to the way we text and use instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. She added that the default way to break up one's thoughts is to send each thought as an individual message.[55]