Interpunct
An interpunct '', also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, or centered dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages.
The multiplication dot or "dot operator" is frequently used in mathematical and scientific notation, and it may differ in appearance from the interpunct.
In written language
Various dictionaries use the interpunct to indicate where to split a word and insert a hyphen if the word doesn't fit on the line. There is also a separate Unicode character,.English
In the early modern era, full stops were sometimes written as interpuncts.In British typography, the space dot was once used as the formal decimal point. Its use was advocated by laws and can still be found in some UK-based academic journals such as The Lancet. In the 1960s, this usage was advocated by the School Mathematics Project, and continues to be used, albeit inconsistently, in primary-school mathematics education. When the pound sterling was decimalised in 1971, the official advice issued was to write decimal amounts with a raised point and to use a decimal point "on the line" only when typesetting constraints made it unavoidable. However, this usage had already been declining since the 1968 ruling by the Ministry of Technology to use the full stop as the decimal point, not only because of that ruling but also because the standard UK keyboard layout has only the full stop.
In the artificially constructed Shavian alphabet, interpuncts are used instead of capitalization as the marker of proper nouns. The dot is placed at the beginning of a word.
Latin
The interpunct was regularly used in classical Latin to separate words. In addition to the most common round form, inscriptions sometimes use a small equilateral triangle for the interpunct, pointing either up or down. It may also appear as a mid-line comma, similar to the [|Greek] practice of the time. The interpunct fell out of use, and Latin was then written scripta continua for several centuries.Franco-Provençal
In Franco-Provençal, the interpunct is used in order to distinguish the following graphemes:- ch·, pronounced, versus ch, pronounced
- j·, pronounced, versus j, pronounced
- g· before e, i, pronounced, versus g before e, i, pronounced
French
Occitano-Romance
Catalan
The punt volat is used in Catalan between two Ls in cases where each belongs to a separate syllable, for example cel·la, "cell". This distinguishes such "geminate Ls", which are pronounced, from "double L", which are written without the flying point and are pronounced. In situations where the flying point is unavailable, periods or hyphens are frequently used as substitutes, but this is tolerated rather than encouraged.Historically, medieval Catalan also used the symbol as a marker for certain elisions, much like the modern apostrophe and hyphenations.
There is no separate physical keyboard layout for Catalan: the flying point can be typed using in the Spanish layout or with on a US English layout. On a mobile phone with a Catalan keyboard layout, the geminate L with a flying dot appears when holding down the key. It appears in Unicode as the pre-composed letters and , but they are compatibility characters and are not frequently used or recommended.
[|Occitan] and Gascon
In Occitan and Gascon, the interpunct is used to distinguish the following graphemes:- s·h, pronounced, versus sh, pronounced, for example, in des·har 'to undo' vs deishar 'to leave'
- n·h, pronounced, versus nh, pronounced, for example in in·hèrn 'hell' vs vinha 'vineyard'
In modern editions of Old Occitan texts, the apostrophe and interpunct are used to denote certain elisions that were not originally marked. The apostrophe is used with proclitic forms and the interpunct is used with enclitic forms:
- que·l versus qu'el
- From Bertran de Born's Ab joi mou lo vers e·l comens :
E·lh vostre bel olh m'an conquis,
E·l doutz esgartz e lo clars vis,
E·l vostre bels essenhamens,
Que, can be m'en pren esmansa,
De beutat no·us trob egansa:
La genser etz c'om posc'e·l mon chauzir,
O no·i vei clar dels olhs ab que·us remir.
Domna·l = Domna, lo
E·lh = E li
E·l = E lo
E·l = E lo
No·us = Non vos
E·l = En lo
No·i = Non i // Que·us = Que vos
O pretty lady, all your grace
and eyes of beauty conquered me,
sweet glance and brightness of your face
and all your nature has to tell
so if I make an appraisal
I find no one like in beauty:
most pleasing to be found in all the world
or else the eyes I see you with have dimmed.
Greek
lacked spacing or interpuncts but instead ran all the letters together. By Late Antiquity, various marks were used to separate words, particularly the Greek comma.In modern Greek, the ano teleia mark is the infrequently-encountered Greek semicolon and is properly romanized as such. In Greek text, Unicode provides the code point ; however, it is canonically equivalent to the interpunct.
The Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria first developed the mark for a function closer to the comma, before it fell out of use and was then repurposed for its present role.
Old Irish
In many linguistic works discussing Old Irish, the interpunct is used to separate a pretonic preverbal element from the stressed syllable of the verb, e.g. do·beir "gives". It is also used in citing the verb forms used after such preverbal elements, e.g. ·beir "carries", to distinguish them from forms used without preverbs, e.g. beirid "carries". In other works, the hyphen or colon may be used for this purpose.Ethiopic
The Geʽez script traditionally separates words with an interpunct of two vertically aligned dots, like a colon, but with larger dots: (For example Starting in the late 19th century the use of such punctuation has largely fallen out of use in favor of whitespace, except in formal hand-written or liturgical texts. In Eritrea the character may be used as a comma.Tibetan
In Tibetan the interpunct, called tsek, is used as a morpheme delimiter.Chinese
The interpunct or "partition sign" is used in Chinese to mark divisions in words transliterated from phonogram languages, particularly names. Some fonts and software render as double-width if it is between double-width characters, Chinese standards recommend half-width between Arabic numerals. In Taiwan, the formal standard, as defined by CNS 11643, historically specified, while should be primarily used in Japanese contexts for separating Katakana words. When the Chinese text is romanized, the partition sign is simply replaced by a standard space or other appropriate punctuation. Thus, William Shakespeare is written as s=威廉·莎士比亞 and George W. Bush as s=乔治·W. 布什. Titles and other translated words are not similarly marked: Genghis Khan and Elizabeth II are simply hp=Chéngjísī hán and t=伊麗莎白二世.The partition sign is also used to separate book and chapter titles when they are mentioned consecutively: book first and then chapter.
Hokkien
In Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Taiwanese Hokkien, middle dot is often used as a workaround for the dot above right diacritic, since most early encoding systems did not support this diacritic. This is now encoded as. Unicode did not support this diacritic until June 2005. Newer fonts often support it natively; however, the practice of using middle dot still exists. Historically, it was derived in the late 19th century from an older barred-o with curly tail as an adaptation to the typewriter.Japanese
Interpuncts are often used to separate transcribed foreign names or words written in katakana. For example, "Beautiful Sunday" becomes ビューティフル・サンデー. A middle dot is also sometimes used to separate lists in Japanese instead of the Japanese comma. Dictionaries and grammar lessons in Japanese sometimes also use a similar symbol to separate a verb suffix from its root. While some fonts may render the Japanese middle dot as a square under great magnification, this is not a defining property of the middle dot that is used in China or Japan.However, the Japanese writing system usually does not use space or punctuation to separate words.
In Japanese typography, there exist two Unicode code points:
- , with a fixed width that is the same as most kana characters, known as fullwidth.
Korean
Interpuncts are used in written Korean to denote a list of two or more words, similarly to how a slash is used to juxtapose words in many other languages. In this role it also functions in a similar way to the English en dash, as in 미·소관계, "American–Soviet relations". The use of interpuncts has declined in years of digital typography and especially in place of slashes, but, in the strictest sense, a slash cannot replace a middle dot in Korean typography.is used more than a middle dot when an interpunct is to be used in Korean typography, though araea is technically not a punctuation symbol but actually an obsolete Hangul jamo. Because araea is a full-width letter, it looks better than middle dot between Hangul. In addition, it is drawn like the middle dot in Windows default Korean fonts such as Batang.