Hypodiastole
The hypodiastole, also known as a diastole, was an interpunct developed in late Ancient and Byzantine Greek texts before the separation of words by spaces was common. In the scriptio continua then used, a group of letters might have separate meanings as a single word or as a pair of words. The papyrological hyphen showed a group of letters should be read together as a single word, and the hypodiastole showed that they should be taken separately. Compare to .
The hypodiastole was similar in appearance to the comma and was eventually entirely conflated with it. In Modern Greek, ypodiastolī́ refers to the comma in its role as a decimal separator, and words such as ό,τι are written with standard commas. A separate Unicode point, ISO/IEC 10646 standard , exists for the hypodiastole but is intended only to reproduce its historical occurrence in Greek texts.