46-411: A full stop is a form of punctuation to end a sentence. Full Stop may also refer to: 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 full stop is frequently used at
92-600: A comma ). In practice, scribes mostly employed the terminal dot; the others fell out of use and were later replaced by other symbols. From the 9th century onwards, the full stop began appearing as a low mark (instead of a high one), and by the time printing began in Western Europe, the lower dot was regular and then universal. The name period is first attested (as the Latin loanword peridos ) in Ælfric of Eynsham 's Old English treatment on grammar. There, it
138-491: A full stop is not used." This does not include, for example, the standard abbreviations for titles such as Professor ("Prof.") or Reverend ("Rev."), because they do not end with the last letter of the word they are abbreviating. In American English , the common convention is to include the period after all such abbreviations. In acronyms and initialisms , the modern style is generally to not use full points after each initial (e.g.: DNA , UK , USSR ). The punctuation
184-611: A make-over of various Oxford reference publications. It is distinct from the similarly titled [New] Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors (originally 1991; 2nd edition, 2009), a companion volume of technical terminology not included in any of the compilation editions. In 2012, Oxford University Press published a new combined edition, New Oxford Style Manual (2nd Edition, ISBN 978-0199657223 ). It includes New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors and New Hart's Rules: The Handbook of Style for Writers and Editors , both from 2005. A second edition of NHR , under
230-560: 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. Pascal uses it both as a means of accessing a member of a record set (the equivalent of struct in C), a member of an object, and after the end construct that defines the body of the program. In APL it is also used for generalised inner product and outer product . In Erlang , Prolog , and Smalltalk , it marks
276-914: A single broadsheet page for in-house use by the OUP in 1893 while Hart's job was controller of the university press. They were originally intended as a concise style guide for the staff of the OUP, but they developed continuously over the years, were published in 1904, and soon gained wider use as a source for authoritative instructions on typesetting style, grammar , punctuation , and usage . Hart's Rules has been revised and republished under different titles, including The Oxford Guide to Style (2002), The Oxford Style Manual (2003, also including The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors of 2000), New Hart's Rules (2005, an updated but abridged, pocket-size version), and New Oxford Style Manual (2012, inclusive of New Hart's Rules and The New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors of 2005, together notably shorter than
322-474: A solid dot. When used with traditional characters , the full stop is generally centered on the mean line ; when used with simplified characters , it is usually aligned to the baseline. In written vertical text , the full stop is sometimes positioned to the top-right or in the top- to center-middle. In Unicode, it is the U+FE12 ︒ PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP . Korean uses
368-453: Is called a dot . It is sometimes called a baseline dot to distinguish it from the interpunct (or middle dot). 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 full stop at the end of a completed thought or expression
414-487: Is declining, and many of these without punctuation have become accepted norms (e.g., "UK" and "NATO"). 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
460-543: Is some national crossover. The American style is common in British fiction writing. 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. The use of placement according to logical or grammatical sense, or "logical convention", now
506-588: Is somewhat more often used in American English, most commonly with U.S. and U.S.A. in particular, depending upon the house style of a particular writer or publisher. As some examples from American style guides, The Chicago Manual of Style (primarily for book and academic-journal publishing) deprecates the use of full points in acronyms, including U.S. , while The Associated Press Stylebook (primarily for journalism) dispenses with full points in acronyms except for certain two-letter cases, including U.S. , U.K. , and U.N. , but not EU . The period glyph
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#1732766135569552-464: Is to place full stops and commas inside quotation marks in most styles. In the British system, which is also called "logical quotation", full stops and commas are placed according to grammatical sense: 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
598-454: Is unintentional omission of a duplicate. In the case of an interrogative or exclamatory sentence ending with an abbreviation, a question or exclamation mark can still be added (e.g. "Are you Gabriel Gama Jr.?"). According to the Oxford A–Z of Grammar and Punctuation , "If the abbreviation includes both the first and last letter of the abbreviated word, as in 'Mister' ['Mr'] and 'Doctor' ['Dr'],
644-415: Is used after some abbreviations . If the abbreviation ends a declaratory sentence there is no additional period immediately following the full stop that ends the abbreviation (e.g. "My name is Gabriel Gama Jr."). Though two full stops (one for the abbreviation, one for the sentence ending) might be expected, conventionally only one is written. This is an intentional omission, and thus not haplography , which
690-707: Is used in the presentation of numbers, either as a decimal separator or as a thousands separator . In the more prevalent usage in English-speaking countries, as well as in South Asia and East Asia, the point represents a decimal separator, visually dividing whole numbers from fractional (decimal) parts. The comma is then used to separate the whole-number parts into groups of three digits each, when numbers are sufficiently large. The more prevalent usage in much of Europe, southern Africa, and Latin America (with
736-644: Is used to mark the end of a poetic verse. However, some languages that are written in Devanagari use the Latin full stop, such as Marathi . In the Eastern Nagari script used to write languages like Bangla and Assamese , the same vertical line ("।") is used for full-stop, known as Daa`ri in Bengali. Also, languages like Odia and Panjabi (which respectively use Oriya and Gurmukhi scripts) use
782-521: The ano teleia , which is named " high stop" but looks like an interpunct , and principally functions as the Greek semicolon . The Armenian script uses the ։ ( վերջակետ , verdjaket ). It looks similar to the colon (:). Punctuation used with Chinese characters (and in Japanese ) often includes U+3002 。 IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP , a small circle used as a full stop instead of
828-607: The hierarchical file system when writing path names—similar to / (forward-slash) in Unix -based systems and \ (back-slash) in MS-DOS -based systems and the Windows NT systems that succeeded them. In Unix-like operating systems, some applications treat files or directories that start with a dot as hidden . This means that they are not displayed or listed to the user by default. In Unix-like systems and Microsoft Windows ,
874-433: The "full point", the punctuation mark that was a dot on the baseline and used in several situations. The phrase full stop was only used to refer to the punctuation mark when it was used to terminate a sentence. This terminological distinction seems to be eroding. For example, the 1998 edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage used full point for the mark used after an abbreviation, but full stop or full point when it
920-408: The "traditional small handbook form", matching New Hart's Rules , and is titled The New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors . It is intended for "people who work with words—authors, copy-editors, proofreaders, students writing essays and dissertations, journalists, people writing reports or other documents, and website editors." This edition was reprinted with a new cover in 2014, to match
966-530: The 2002/2003 version, it also abridged some, to fit into its small format. The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors , also compiled by Ritter, had been available since 2000 as a separate companion volume to Hart's , in line with the eleven editions of the dictionary's famous predecessor, the Authors' and Printers' Dictionary by Frederick Howard Collins (first published in 1905 and renamed in 1983). A freshly compiled successor, published in 2005, returned to
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#17327661355691012-516: The 2003 combined edition). A revised second edition of New Hart's Rules (without the Dictionary ) was released in 2014, and a second New Oxford Style Manual was compiled in 2016, using the 2014 versions of both of the individual volumes. After their first appearance, Hart's rules were reissued in a second edition in 1894, and two further editions in 1895. They were continually revised, enlarged and reissued, and had reached their 15th edition by
1058-622: The 40th edition of Hart's ) under the title The Oxford Guide to Style and the editorship of Robert M. Ritter, promoted as "Hart's Rules for the 21st Century". The Oxford Style Manual (2003, ISBN 978-0198605645 ) combined in a single volume, of 1056 pages, The Oxford Guide to Style (2002) and The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (2000). From this version was adapted New Hart's Rules: The Handbook of Style for Writers and Editors , first published in September 2005. While New Hart's Rules ( NHR ) rewrites some material from
1104-753: The BBC, but only with 24-hour times, according to its news style guide as updated in August 2020. The point as a time separator is also used in Irish English, particularly by the Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), and to a lesser extent in Australian, Cypriot, Maltese, New Zealand, South African and other Commonwealth English varieties outside Canada. The practice in the United States and Canada
1150-480: The C-shell.) Versions of software are often denoted with the style x . y . z (or more), where x is a major release, y is a mid-cycle enhancement release and z is a patch level designation, but actual usage is entirely vendor specific. The term STOP was used in telegrams in the United States in place of the full stop. The end of a sentence would be marked by STOP ; its use "in telegraphic communications
1196-498: The Croatian and Bosnian standards) uses the dot in role of the ordinal indicator only past Arabic numerals, while Roman numerals are used without a dot. In Polish , the period can be omitted if there is no ambiguity whether a given numeral is ordinal or cardinal. In modern texts, multilevel numbered headings are widely used. E.g. number 2.3.1.5 is a 4th level heading within the chapter 2. In older literature on mathematical logic ,
1242-478: The Latin full stop along with its native script . Indo-Aryan languages predominantly use Nagari -based scripts. In the Devanagari script used to write languages like Hindi , Maithili , Nepali , etc., a vertical line । (U+0964 "Devanagari Danda") is used to mark the end of a sentence. It is known as poorna viraam (full stop). In Sanskrit , an additional symbol ॥ (U+0965 "Devanagari Double Danda")
1288-408: The aforementioned system popular in most English-speaking countries, but separates values of one hundred thousand and above differently, into divisions of lakh and crore : In countries that use the comma as a decimal separator, the point is sometimes found as a multiplication sign; for example, 5,2 . 2 = 10,4; this usage is impractical in cases where the point is used as a decimal separator, hence
1334-410: The dot character represents the working directory of the file system. Two dots ( .. ) represent the parent directory of the working directory. Bourne shell -derived command-line interpreters, such as sh , ksh , and bash , use the dot as a command to read a file and execute its content in the running interpreter . (Some of these also offer source as a synonym, based on that usage in
1380-637: The dot is commonly used and some style guides recommend it when telling time, including those from non- BBC public broadcasters in the UK, the academic manual published by Oxford University Press under various titles, as well as the internal house style book for the University of Oxford , and that of The Economist , The Guardian and The Times newspapers. American and Canadian English mostly prefers and uses colons (:) (i.e., 11:15 PM/pm/p.m. or 23:15 for AmE/CanE and 11.15 pm or 23.15 for BrE), so does
1426-503: The end of a statement ("sentence"). In a regular expression , it represents a match of any character. In Perl and PHP , the dot is the string concatenation operator. In the Haskell standard library, it is the function composition operator. In COBOL a full stop ends a statement. In file systems , the dot is commonly used to separate the extension of a file name from the name of the file. RISC OS uses dots to separate levels of
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1472-491: The end of sentences that are not questions or exclamations. It is usual in North American English to use full stops after initials; e.g. A. A. Milne , George W. Bush . British usage is less strict. A few style guides discourage full stops after initials. However, there is a general trend and initiatives to spell out names in full instead of abbreviating them in order to avoid ambiguity. A full stop
1518-535: 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."). However, the use of full stops after letters in an initialism or acronym
1564-534: The exception of Mexico due to the influence of the United States), reverses the roles of the comma and point, but sometimes substitutes a ( thin -)space for a point. (To avoid problems with spaces, another convention sometimes used is to use apostrophe signs (') instead of spaces.) India , Bangladesh , Nepal , and Pakistan follow the Indian numbering system , which utilizes commas and decimals much like
1610-593: The full title New Hart's Rules: The Oxford Style Guide , was published in October 2014, under new editor Anne Waddingham. Another combined edition, again titled New Oxford Style Manual (3rd Edition, ISBN 978-0198767251 ), was released in March 2016, with the content of the 2014 editions of New Hart's Rules and New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors , and matching their cover style. New Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors (2009) remains
1656-456: The more common practice in regions other than North America, 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: Although
1702-449: The period glyph used to indicate how expressions should be bracketed (see Glossary of Principia Mathematica ). In computing , the full point, usually called a dot in this context, is often used as a delimiter , such as in DNS lookups, Web addresses, file names and software release versions: It is used in many programming languages as an important part of the syntax. C uses it as
1748-505: The present Greek full stop ( τελεία , teleía ) is romanized as a Latin full stop and encoded identically with the full stop in Unicode , the historic full stop in Greek was a high dot and the low dot functioned as a kind of comma , as noted above . The low dot was increasingly but irregularly used to mark full stops after the 9th century and was fully adapted after the advent of print. The teleia should also be distinguished from
1794-625: The same symbol. The Oxford Guide to Style Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford (now published as New Hart's Rules ) is a reference book and style guide published in England by Oxford University Press (OUP). Hart's Rules originated as a compilation of best practices and standards by English printer and biographer Horace Hart over almost three decades during his employment at other printing establishments, but they were first printed as
1840-400: The time they were eventually published as a book in March 1904. New editions and reprints continued to appear over almost eight decades, until the 39th edition (1983) which was reprinted fifteen times—the last in 2000. Three of these reprints included corrections: 1986, 1987, and 1989. In February 2002, Oxford University Press published a new and much longer version (what would have been
1886-801: The use of the interpunct : 5.2 · 2 = 10.4. The interpunct is also used when multiplying units in science – for example, 50 km/h could be written as 50 km·h – and to indicate a dot product , i.e. the scalar product of two vectors. In many languages, an ordinal dot is used as the ordinal indicator . This apply mostly in Central and Northern Europe: in German , Hungarian , several Slavic languages ( Czech , Slovak , Slovene , Serbo-Croatian ), Faroese , Icelandic , Danish , Norwegian , Finnish , Estonian , Latvian , and also in Basque and Turkish . The Serbian standard of Serbo-Croatian (unlike
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1932-529: The word "period" serves this function. Another common use in African-American Vernacular English is found in the phrase "And that's on period", which is used to express the strength of the speaker's previous statement, usually to emphasise an opinion. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses the full stop to signify a syllable break. In British English, whether for the 12-hour clock or sometimes its 24-hour counterpart ,
1978-434: Was distinguished from the full stop (the distinctio ), and continued the Greek underdot's earlier function as a comma between phrases. It shifted its meaning, to a dot marking a full stop, in the works of the 16th-century grammarians. In 19th-century texts, British English and American English both frequently used the terms period and full stop . The word period was used as a name for what printers often called
2024-512: Was employed at the end of a sentence; the 2015 edition, however, treats them as synonymous (and prefers full stop ), and New Hart's Rules does likewise (but prefers full point ). The last edition (1989) of the original Hart's Rules (before it became The Oxford Guide to Style in 2002) exclusively used full point . Full stops are the most commonly used punctuation marks; analysis of texts indicate that approximately half of all punctuation marks used are full stops. Full stops indicate
2070-550: Was greatly increased during the World War, when the Government employed it widely as a precaution against having messages garbled or misunderstood, as a result of the misplacement or emission [ sic ] of the tiny dot or period." In British English, the words "full stop" at the end of an utterance strengthen it; they indicate that it admits of no discussion: "I'm not going with you, full stop." In American English,
2116-399: Was marked by a high dot ⟨˙⟩, called the stigmḕ teleía ( στιγμὴ τελεία ) or "terminal dot". The "middle dot" ⟨·⟩, the stigmḕ mésē ( στιγμὴ μέση ), marked a division in a thought occasioning a longer breath (essentially a semicolon ), while the low dot ⟨.⟩, called the hypostigmḕ ( ὑποστιγμή ) or "underdot", marked a division in a thought occasioning a shorter breath (essentially
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