full stop

 

A full stop or period (sometimes stop, full 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 full stop is rarely used by speakers in the United States and Canada, but is the only 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. 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.K.) and at the ends of sentences, but excluding certain special uses of dots at the bottom of a line of text, such as ellipses.

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.

The word "period", although recognised as an Americanism, is used more broadly as an interjection to terminate a phrase or thought with finality and emphasis, as in "This is your last chance, period."[1] The term full stop is also used in this sense in many parts of the world.

. Punctuation
apostrophe ( ’ ' ) brackets ( ), [ ], { }, < > colon ( : ) comma ( , ) dashes ( ‒, –, —, ― ) ellipsis ( …, ... ) exclamation mark ( ! ) full stop/period ( . ) guillemets ( « » ) hyphen ( -, ‐ ) question mark ( ? ) quotation marks ( ‘ ’, “ ” ) semicolon ( ; ) slash/stroke ( / ) solidus ( ∕ )
Interword separation
spaces ( ) ( ) ( ) interpunct ( · )
General typography
ampersand ( & ) asterisk ( * ) at ( @ ) backslash ( \ ) bullet ( • ) caret ( ^ ) currency ( ¤ ) ¢, $, €, £, ¥, ₩, ₪ dagger/obelisk ( † ) ( ‡ ) degree ( ° ) inverted exclamation point ( ¡ ) inverted question mark ( ¿ ) number sign ( # ) numero sign ( № ) percent and related signs ( %, ‰, ‱ ) pilcrow ( ¶ ) prime ( ′ ) section sign ( § ) tilde/swung dash ( ~ ) umlaut/diaeresis ( ¨ ) underscore/understrike ( _ ) vertical/pipe/broken bar ( |, ¦ )
Uncommon typography
asterism ( ⁂ ) index/fist ( ☞ ) therefore sign ( ∴ ) lozenge ( ◊ ) interrobang ( ‽ ) irony mark ( ؟ ) reference mark ( ※ ) sarcasm mark (+ +)

Abbreviations

A full stop is used after some abbreviations. If the abbreviation is ending a declaratory sentence an additional full stop is not needed (e.g. My name is Phil Simpson, Jr.), but in the case of an interrogative or exclamatory sentence a question or exclamation mark is needed. In 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] In American English, these are always written "Dr." and "Mrs." In this use, the period is also occasionally known as a suspension mark.

In initialisms, full stops are placed after each initial in American English (K.G.B.), but not in British English (e.g. BBC), though for acronyms, which are pronounced like words (e.g. NATO), it is common practice to omit the full stops in American English.

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:

• 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:

• 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.

Differences in British English and American English

In British English, when a quotation mark appears at the end of a sentence the full stop is usually placed after it. The matter is partly determined by the length of the enclosed material: the longer it is, more acceptable it is that the full stop should come first. Any full sentence enclosed within quotation marks will have its full stop before the final quotation mark.

In American English the full stop normally comes before the quotation mark. (This applies to commas and some other punctuation, also.)

Examples of typical usage:

• [British:] You say "tomAYto", I say "tomAHto".
• [American:] I say "tomAYto," you say "tomAHto."

An exception to the American rule occurs when the placing of the full stop inside the quote would lead to ambiguity, for example in describing commands to be typed into a computer:

• At the prompt type "ls -lass".

In the case above, giving the instruction:

• At the prompt type "ls -lass."

would result in an error, since the full stop has special significance in instructions typed into a computer.

Spacing after full stop

In typewritten texts and other documents printed in fixed-width fonts, there is a convention among lay 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 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.

Many descriptivists (i.e., people who describe how language is used in practice) 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^[3], and the The Chicago Manual of Style.^[4] Many prescriptivists (i.e., people who make recommendations for rules of language use), 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.^[5]

With the advent of standardized HTML for rendering webpages, the broader distinction between full stop spacing and internal spacing in a sentence has become largely moot on the World Wide Web. 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   (Non-breaking space) to represent extra spaces, and this is done automatically by some WYSIWYG editors, such as Wikipedia's own editing interface.

A strong argument for having two spaces after a full stop arises from accessibility, or universal design. It is often reported that people with dyslexia prefer double spacing after a full stop.^[6] See justification (typesetting) for further discussion.

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, Marathi and 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).

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:

www.example.com

document.odf

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.

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.

In Unix-like systems, the dot character represents 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.

See also

• Dot
• Decimal separator

Notes

1. ^ Julian Borger in The Guardian, February 3, 2006
2. ^ Oxford A–Z of Grammar and Punctuation by John Seely
3. ^ "5.11 Spacing and Punctuation Space once after all punctuation as follows: after commas, colons, and semicolons; after punctuation marks at the end of sentences; after periods that separate parts of a reference citation; and after the periods of the initials in personal names." Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th edition, 2001.
4. ^ "6.11 Space between sentences In typeset matter, one space, not two (in other words, a regular word space), follows any mark of punctuation that ends a sentence, whether a period, a colon, a question mark, an exclamation point, or closing quotation marks." The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, 2003.
5. ^ "Use one space (not two) after these punctuation marks [sc. period, question mark, exclamation point, or colon], as the practice of using two spaces is just another holdover from using a typewriter." Schriver, Karen A, Dynamics in Document Design, Wiley, NY, 1997, p. 502; "In typewritten (as distinct from typeset) material, it was customary to place two spaces after a colon, semicolon, full stop or other sentence closing punctuation. Programs for word processing and desktop publishing offer more sophisticated, variable spacing, so this practice of double spacing is now avoided because it can create distracting gaps on a page." AGPS Style Manual, 2002, 6th edition, p. 117.
6. ^ A web search produces a few sources that express this. Like http://juicystudio.com/article/zoom-low-vision.php

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

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