A full stop or period (sometimes stop, full point, decimal point, or dot), is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and many other languages. A full stop consists of a small dot placed at the end of a line of text, such as at the end of this sentence: The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ... In linguistics, a sentence is a unit of language, characterized in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

The term full stop is rarely used by speakers in the United States and Canada, but is by far the more common term used in British English. If it is used in Canada, it may be generally differentiated from period in contexts where both might be used: a full stop is specifically a delimiting piece of punctuation that represents the end of a sentence.^{[citation needed]} When a distinction is made, a period is then any appropriately sized and placed dot in English language text, including use in abbreviations (such as U.S.) and at the ends of sentences, but excluding certain special uses of dots at the bottom of a line of text, such as ellipses. British English (BrE, BE, en-GB) is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere in the Anglophone world. ... The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ... This article is about the punctuation symbol. ...

The term STOP was used in telegrams in place of the period. The end of a sentence would be marked by STOP, as punctuation cost extra.^[1] The end of the entire telegram would be noted by FULL STOP. Telegraphy (from the Greek words tele = far away and grapho = write) is the long distance transmission of written messages without physical transport of letters, originally over wire. ...

Abbreviations

A full stop is used after some abbreviations. If the abbreviation ends a declaratory sentence there is no additional full stop immediately following the full stop that ends the abbreviation (e.g., My name is Phil Simpson, Jr.), but in the case of an interrogative or exclamatory sentence a question or exclamation mark is still added. In most British English, if the abbreviation includes both the first and last letter of the abbreviated word, as in mister and doctor, a full stop is not used.^[2] However, British English also frequently abbreviates Professor as Prof, violating this rule. In American English, these are normally written Dr., Mrs., and Prof. In this use, the full stop is also occasionally known as a suspension mark.^{[citation needed][dubious – discuss]} An abbreviation (from Latin brevis short) is a shortened form of a word or phrase. ... British English (BrE, BE, en-GB) is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere in the Anglophone world. ... For other uses, see American English (disambiguation). ...

In initialisms, full stops are somewhat more often placed after each initial in American English (e.g., U.S., U.S.S.R.) than in British English (e.g., US, USSR). However, for acronyms that are pronounced like words (e.g., NATO), full stops are omitted in American English. Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial letter or letters of words, such as NATO and XHTML, and are pronounced in a way that is distinct from the full pronunciation of what the letters stand for. ... Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial letter or letters of words, such as NATO and XHTML, and are pronounced in a way that is distinct from the full pronunciation of what the letters stand for. ...

Mathematical usage

The same glyph has two separate uses with regard to numbers, the one applied being determined by the country it is used in: as a decimal separator and in presenting large numbers in a more readable form. In most English-speaking countries, the full stop has the former usage while a comma or a space is used for the latter: variant glyphs representing the character a (allographs of a) in the Zapfino typeface. ... The decimal separator is a symbol used to mark the boundary between the integral and the fractional parts of a decimal numeral. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The term comma has various uses; comma is the name used for one of the punctuation symbols: , The term comma is also used in music theory for various small intervals that arise as differences between approximately equal intervals. ...

• 1,000,000 (One million)
• 1,000.000 (One thousand)

In much of Europe, however, a comma is used as a decimal separator, while a full stop or a space is used for the presentation of large numbers: The decimal separator is a symbol used to mark the boundary between the integral and the fractional parts of a decimal numeral. ...

• 1.000.000 (One million)
• 1.000,000 or 1 000,000 (One thousand)

In countries that use the comma as a decimal separator, the full stop is sometimes found as a multiplication sign, for example: 5,2 . 2 = 10,4. This usage is impossible in countries that use the period as a decimal separator, hence the use of the interpunct: 5.2 · 2 = 10.4.^{[citation needed]} In mathematics, multiplication is an elementary arithmetic operation. ... An interpunct · is a small dot used for interword separation in ancient Latin script, being perhaps the first consistent visual representation of word boundaries in written language. ...

Differences between languages

British English and American English

Main article: Quotation mark#Punctuation

The traditional convention in American English is for full stops to be included inside the quotation marks, even if they are not part of the quoted sentence, while the British style shows clearly whether or not the punctuation is part of the quoted phrase. The American rule is derived from typesetting while the British rule is grammatical (see below for more explanation). Although the terms American style and British style are used it is not as clear cut as that because at least one major British newspaper prefers typesetters' quotation (punctuation inside) and BBC News uses both styles, while scientific and technical publications, even in the U.S., almost universally use logical quotation (punctuation outside unless part of the source material), due to its precision. Quotation marks or inverted commas (also called quotes and speech marks) are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech, a quotation, a phrase or a word. ... For other uses, see American English (disambiguation). ... BBC News is the department within the BBC responsible for the corporations news-gathering and production of news programmes on BBC television, radio and online. ...

As with many such differences, the American rule follows an older British standard. The typesetter’s rule was standard in early 19th century Britain; the grammatical rule was advocated by the extremely influential book The King’s English, by Fowler and Fowler. The Kings English is a book on English usage and grammar. ...

• “Carefree” means “free from care or anxiety.” (American style)
• “Carefree” means “free from care or anxiety”. (British style)

In British style, both single and double quotation marks are possible, but more modern style guides like the BBC’s tend to prefer the latter.^[3] For other uses, see BBC (disambiguation). ...

Before the advent of mechanical type, the order of quotation marks with periods and commas was not given much consideration. The printing press required that the easily damaged smallest pieces of type for the comma and period be protected behind the more robust quotation marks.^[4] The U.S. style still adheres to this older tradition in formal writing but usually not in everyday use. Today, most areas of publication conform to one of the two standards above. However, in subjects such as chemistry and software documentation it is conventional to include only the precise quoted text within the quotation marks. This avoids ambiguity with regard to whether a punctuation mark belongs to the quotation:

Enter the URL as “www.wikipedia.org”, the name as “Wikipedia”, and click “OK”.

The URL starts with “www.wikipedia.”. This is followed by “org” or “com”.

References: Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition; Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford. The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) is a highly regarded style guide for American English, dealing with questions of style, manuscript preparation, and, to a lesser degree, usage. ... Harts Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford is a reference book and style guide first published in 1893. ...

Spacing after full stop

In typewritten texts and other documents printed in fixed-width fonts, there is a convention among lay American English writers that two spaces are placed after the full stop (along with the other sentence enders: question mark and exclamation mark), as opposed to the single space used after other punctuation symbols. This is sometimes termed "French spacing". In typography, a typeface is a co-ordinated set of character designs, which usually comprises an alphabet of letters, a set of numerals and a set of punctuation marks. ... For other uses, see American English (disambiguation). ... This article is about a typographical convention used in English text. ...

In modern English-language typographical usage, debate has arisen concerning the proper number of trailing spaces after a full stop (or exclamation mark, or question mark) to separate sentences within a paragraph. Whereas two spaces are still regarded by many outside the publishing industry to be the better usage for monospace typefaces, the awkwardness that most word-processing applications have in representing correctly the 1.5 spaces that had previously become standard for typographically proportional (non-monospace) fonts has led to some confusion about how to render the space between sentences using only word-processing tools. In linguistics, a sentence is a unit of language, characterized in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. ... Block quoItalic textte A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea, or the words of an author. ... “Font” redirects here. ...

Many descriptivists^[5] support the notion that a single space after a full stop should be considered standard because it has been the norm in mainstream publishing for many decades. This is supported by the MLA, APA^[6], and The Chicago Manual of Style.^[7] Many prescriptivists,^[5] meanwhile, adhere to the earlier use of two spaces on typewriters to make the separation of sentences more salient than separation of elements within sentences. Since current style guides are founded on the consensus of practice, the evidence strongly suggests that most people accept the single space in modern word-processing, largely for the reason that two spaces may stretch inordinately when full justification is applied. Additionally, many computer typefaces are designed proportionately to alleviate the need for the double space (the opposition would of course reply that this does nothing to satisfy the aforementioned saliency issue). Most widely accepted contemporary style guides categorically require that only one space be placed after full stops and similar punctuation marks, and they characterise modern practice as avoiding it.^[8] The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Fifth Edition The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of literature and literary criticism. ... Further information: MLA Style Manual American Psychological Association (APA) style is a widely-accepted style of documentation for APA style specifies the names and order of headings, formatting and organization of citations and references, and the arrangement of tables, figures, footnotes, and appendices, as well as other manuscript and documentation... The Chicago Manual of Style (abbreviated CMS or CMOS, and spoken as Chicago) is a style guide for American English published by the University of Chicago Press (hence its title), prescribing a writing style widely used in publishing. ... In typesetting, justification is the setting of text or images within a column or measure to align along both the left and right margin. ...

With the advent of the World Wide Web, the broader distinction between full stop spacing and internal spacing in a sentence has become largely moot. Standardized HTML treats additional whitespace after the first space as immaterial (siding unquestioningly with the one-spacers), and ignores it when rendering the page. A common workaround for this is the use of   character entity (non-breaking space) to represent extra spaces, and this is done automatically by some WYSIWYG editors. WWWs historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. ... HTML, an initialism of Hypertext Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. ... HTML has been in use since 1991 (note that the W3C international standard is now XHTML), but the first standardized version with a reasonably complete treatment of international characters was version 4. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... WYSIWYG (IPA Pronunciation [] or []), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. ...

Asian full stop

In some Asian languages, notably Chinese and Japanese, a small circle is used instead of a solid dot: "。" (U+3002 "Ideographic Full Stop"). Unlike the Western full stop, this is often used to separate consecutive sentences, rather than to finish every sentence; it is frequently left out where a sentence stands alone, or where text is terminated by a quotation mark instead.

In the Devanagari script used to write Hindi, Sanskrit and some other Indian languages a vertical line ("|") is used to mark the end of a sentence. In Hindi it is known as poorna viraam (full stop). Some Indian languages also use the full-stop such as Marathi. च् + छ = च्छ Devanagari in Unicode The Unicode range for Devanagari is U+0900 . ... Hindi (DevanāgarÄ«: or , IAST: , IPA:  ), an Indo-European language spoken all over India in varying degrees and extensively in northern and central India, is one of the 22 official languages of India and is used, along with English, for central government administrative purposes. ... Sanskrit ( , for short ) is a classical language of India, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, and one of the 23 official languages of India. ... The article describes the languages spoken in the Republic of India. ... Hindi (DevanāgarÄ«: or , IAST: , IPA:  ), an Indo-European language spoken all over India in varying degrees and extensively in northern and central India, is one of the 22 official languages of India and is used, along with English, for central government administrative purposes. ... Marathi is one of the widely spoken languages of India, and has a long literary history. ...

Computing use

In computing, the period is often used as a delimiter commonly called a "dot", for example in DNS lookups and file names. For example: For the formal concept of computation, see computation. ... Delimiters are marks which are used to seperate subfields of data. ... The Domain Name System (DNS) associates various sorts of information with so-called domain names; most importantly, it serves as the phone book for the Internet by translating human-readable computer hostnames, e. ... This article is about computer files and file systems in general terms. ...

www.example.com

document.doc

In computer programming, the full stop corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 46, or 0x2E. It is used in many programming languages as an important part of the syntax. C uses it as a means of accessing a member of a struct, and this syntax was inherited by C++ as a means of accessing a member of a class or object. Java and Python also follow this convention. Programming redirects here. ... The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ... Image:ASCII fullsvg There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal, base-16, or simply hex, is a numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16, usually written using the symbols 0–9 and A–F, or a–f. ... Other listings of programming languages are: Categorical list of programming languages Generational list of programming languages Chronological list of programming languages Note: Esoteric programming languages have been moved to the separate List of esoteric programming languages. ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... A struct is the C programming languages notion of a record, a datatype that aggregates a fixed set of labelled objects, possibly of different types, into a single object. ... C++ (pronounced see plus plus, IPA: ) is a general-purpose programming language with high-level and low-level capabilities. ... In object-oriented programming, a class is a programming language construct used to group related fields and methods. ... In strictly mathematical branches of computer science the term object is used in a purely mathematical sense to refer to any thing. While this interpretation is useful in the discussion of abstract theory, it is not concrete enough to serve as a primitive datatype in the discussion of more concrete... Java language redirects here. ... Python is a high-level programming language first released by Guido van Rossum in 1991. ...

In file systems, the full stop is commonly used to separate the extension of a file name from the name of the file. RISC OS uses full stops to separate levels of the hierarchical file system when writing path names - similar to / in Unix-based systems and in MS-DOS-based systems. See Filing system for this term as it is used in libraries and offices In computing, a file system is a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them. ... In metaphysics, extension is the property of taking up space; see Extension (metaphysics). ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®, sometimes also written as or ® with small caps) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ...

In Unix-like systems, the dot character represents the working directory. Two dots (..) represent the parent directory of the working directory. The Bash shell also uses the dot as a synonym for the source command, which reads the contents of a file and executes them. Diagram of the relationships between several Unix-like systems A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ... For computer operating systems that support a hierarchial file system, the working directory is the directory path that a user or program has designated to be the directory for files referenced by name only, or by a relative path (as contrasted with using both a files name and a... A parent directory of a given directory A is such a directory B in which the directory A is located. ... This article is about the Unix shell. ...

See also

• Dot
• Decimal separator

Dot can refer to several different characters: full stop, or period, primarily used in writing to end a sentence. ... The decimal separator is a symbol used to mark the boundary between the integral and the fractional parts of a decimal numeral. ...

Notes

In linguistics, prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of rules governing how a language is to be used. ...

External links

• Chicago Style Q&A on one space versus two after sentences
• The Double-Space Debate A discussion on Blogdorf about one space versus two after sentences
• FontSite typographic design center on one space versus two after sentences