Katana VentraIP

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.

1.007 (one and seven thousandths)

1,002.007 (one thousand two and seven thousandths)

1,002,003.007 (one million two thousand three and seven thousandths)

Bruce Springsteen, nicknamed "the Boss," performed "American Skin." (closed or American style)

Bruce Springsteen, nicknamed "the Boss", performed "American Skin". (logical or British style)

He said, "I love music." (both)

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.

One word space (""). This is the current convention in most countries that use the ISO basic Latin alphabet for published and final written work, as well as digital media.[42][43]

French spacing

Two word spaces (""). It is sometimes claimed that the two-space convention stems from the use of the monospaced font on typewriters, but in fact that convention replicates much earlier typography—the intent was to provide a clear break between sentences.[44] This spacing method was gradually replaced by the single space convention in published print, where space is at a premium, and continues in much digital media.[43][45]

English spacing

One widened space (such as an ). This spacing was seen in historical typesetting practices (until the early 20th century).[46] It has also been used in other typesetting systems such as the Linotype machine[47] and the TeX system.[48] Modern computer-based digital fonts can adjust the spacing after terminal punctuation as well, creating a space slightly wider than a standard word space.[49]

em space

There have been a number of practices relating to the spacing after a full stop. Some examples are listed below:

U+002E . FULL STOP

U+0589 ։ ARMENIAN FULL STOP

U+06D4 ۔ ARABIC FULL STOP

U+0701 ܁ SYRIAC SUPRALINEAR FULL STOP

U+0702 ܂ SYRIAC SUBLINEAR FULL STOP

U+1362 ETHIOPIC FULL STOP

U+166E CANADIAN SYLLABICS FULL STOP

U+1803 MONGOLIAN FULL STOP

U+1809 MONGOLIAN MANCHU FULL STOP

U+2488 DIGIT ONE FULL STOP

U+2489 DIGIT TWO FULL STOP

U+248A DIGIT THREE FULL STOP

U+248B DIGIT FOUR FULL STOP

U+248C DIGIT FIVE FULL STOP

U+248D DIGIT SIX FULL STOP

U+248E DIGIT SEVEN FULL STOP

U+248F DIGIT EIGHT FULL STOP

U+2490 DIGIT NINE FULL STOP

U+2491 NUMBER TEN FULL STOP

U+2492 NUMBER ELEVEN FULL STOP

U+2493 NUMBER TWELVE FULL STOP

U+2494 NUMBER THIRTEEN FULL STOP

U+2495 NUMBER FOURTEEN FULL STOP

U+2496 NUMBER FIFTEEN FULL STOP

U+2497 NUMBER SIXTEEN FULL STOP

U+2498 NUMBER SEVENTEEN FULL STOP

U+2499 NUMBER EIGHTEEN FULL STOP

U+249A NUMBER NINETEEN FULL STOP

U+249B NUMBER TWENTY FULL STOP

U+2CF9 COPTIC OLD NUBIAN FULL STOP

U+2CFE COPTIC FULL STOP

U+2E3C

STENOGRAPHIC FULL STOP

U+3002 IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP

U+A4FF LISU PUNCTUATION FULL STOP

U+A60E VAI FULL STOP

U+A6F3 BAMUM FULL STOP

U+FE12 PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP

U+FE52 SMALL FULL STOP

U+FF0E [51]

FULLWIDTH FULL STOP

U+FF61 HALFWIDTH IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP

U+16AF5 𖫵 BASSA VAH FULL STOP

U+16E98 𖺘 MEDEFAIDRIN FULL STOP

U+1BC9F 𛲟 DUPLOYAN PUNCTUATION CHINOOK FULL STOP

U+1DA88 𝪈 SIGNWRITING FULL STOP

U+1F100 🄀 DIGIT ZERO FULL STOP

U+E002E TAG FULL STOP

The symbol was encoded in ASCII at 46 (2Ehex), which was inherited by Unicode. All Unicode code points with "full stop" in their name:

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]

 – Numerical symbol

Decimal separator

Dot (disambiguation)

 – Horizontal space between sentences in typeset text

Sentence spacing

 – Marks that identify the end of some text

Terminal punctuation