Interpunct

An interpunct ·, also known as an interpoint,^[1] middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. (Word-separating spaces did not appear until some time between 600 and 800 CE.) 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.

Various dictionaries use the interpunct (in this context, sometimes called a hyphenation point) 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, U+2027 ‧ HYPHENATION POINT.

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.^[2] When the pound sterling was decimalised in 1971, the official advice issued was to write decimal amounts with a raised point (for example, £21·48) 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,^[3] not only because of that ruling but also because it is the widely-adopted international standard,^[4] and because the standard UK keyboard layout (for typewriters and computers) has only the full stop. The space dot is still used by some in handwriting.

In the early modern era, full stops (periods) were sometimes written as interpuncts (for example in the depicted 1646 transcription of the Mayflower Compact).

In the Shavian alphabet, interpuncts replace capitalization as the marker of proper nouns. The dot is placed at the beginning of a word.

The punt volat ("flying point") 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" (ela geminada), which are pronounced [ɫː], from "double L" (doble ela), which are written without the flying point and are pronounced [ʎ]. In situations where the flying point is unavailable, periods (as in col.lecció) or hyphens (as in col-lecció) 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 (see Occitan below) and hyphenations.

There is no separate physical keyboard layout for Catalan: the flying point can be typed using ⇧ Shift+3 in the Spanish (Spain) layout or with Option +⇧ Shift+9 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 L key. It appears in Unicode as the pre-composed letters Ŀ (U+013F) and ŀ (U+0140), but they are compatibility characters and are not frequently used or recommended.^[5][a]

The interpunct is used in Chinese (which generally lacks spacing between characters) to mark divisions in words transliterated from phonogram languages, particularly names. Lacking its own code point in Unicode, the interpunct in Chinese shares the code point U+00B7 (·), and it is properly (and in Taiwan formally)^[6] of full-width U+30FB (・). 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 威廉·莎士比亞 (Wēilián Shāshìbǐyà) and George W. Bush as 喬治·W·布什 (喬治·W·布殊; Qiáozhì W. Bùshí). Titles and other translated words are not similarly marked: Genghis Khan and Elizabeth II are simply 成吉思汗 (Chéngjísī hán) and 伊利沙伯二世 (伊麗莎白二世; Yīlìshābái èrshì) without a partition sign.

The partition sign is also used to separate book and chapter titles when they are mentioned consecutively: book first and then chapter.

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 U+0358 ◌͘ COMBINING DOT ABOVE RIGHT (see o͘). 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.

In Tibetan the interpunct, called tsek (ཙེག་), is used as a morpheme delimiter.

The Geʽez (Ethiopic) script traditionally separates words with an interpunct of two vertically aligned dots, like a colon, but with larger dots: U+1361 ፡ ETHIOPIC WORDSPACE. (For example ገድለ፡ወለተ፡ጴጥሮስ). 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.^[7]

In Franco-Provençal (or Arpitan), the interpunct is used in order to distinguish the following graphemes:

• ch·, pronounced [ʃ], versus ch, pronounced [ts]
• j·, pronounced [ʒ], versus j, pronounced [dz]
• g· before e, i, pronounced [ʒ], versus g before e, i, pronounced [dz]

In modern French, the interpunct is sometimes used for gender-neutral writing, as in les salarié·e·s for les salariés et les salariées ("the employees [both male and female]").

Ancient 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.^[8]

In modern Greek, the ano teleia mark (Greek: άνω τελεία, romanized: ánō teleía, lit. 'upper stop'; also known as άνω στιγμή, áno stigmí) is the infrequently-encountered Greek semicolon and is properly romanized as such.^[9] In Greek text, Unicode provides the code point U+0387 · GREEK ANO TELEIA,^[10] however, it is also expressed as an interpunct. In practice, the separate code point for ano teleia canonically decomposes to the interpunct.^[8]

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.^[8]

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 (Byūtifuru·sandē). 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 (though the mixing of katakana, kanji and hiragana gives some indication of word boundary).

In Japanese typography, there exist two Unicode code points:

• U+30FB ・ KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT, with a fixed width that is the same as most kana characters, known as fullwidth.
• U+FF65 ･ HALFWIDTH KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT

The interpunct also has a number of other uses in Japanese, including the following: to separate titles, names and positions: 課長補佐・鈴木 (Assistant Section Head · Suzuki); as a decimal point when writing numbers in kanji: 三・一四一五九二 (3.141 592); as a slash when writing for "or" in abbreviations: 月・水・金曜日 (Mon/Wed/Friday); and in place of hyphens, dashes and colons when writing vertically.

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.

U+318D ㆍ HANGUL LETTER ARAEA (아래아) 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.

The interpunct (interpunctus) 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 c. 200 CE, and Latin was then written scripta continua for several centuries.^{[citation needed]}

In Occitan, especially in the Gascon dialect, the interpunct (punt interior, literally, "inner dot", or ponch naut for "high / upper point") is used to distinguish the following graphemes:

• s·h, pronounced [s.h], versus sh, pronounced [ʃ], for example, in des·har 'to undo' vs deishar 'to leave'
• n·h, pronounced [n.h], versus nh, pronounced [ɲ], for example in in·hèrn 'hell' vs vinha 'vineyard'

Although it is considered to be a spelling error, a period is frequently used when a middle dot is unavailable: des.har, in.hèrn, which is the case for French keyboard layout.

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 (que lo, that the) versus qu'el (that he)
• From Bertran de Born's Ab joi mou lo vers e·l comens (translated by James H. Donalson):

In many linguistic works discussing Old Irish (but not in actual Old Irish manuscripts), 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 (the prototonic forms), e.g. ·beir "carries", to distinguish them from forms used without preverbs, e.g. beirid "carries".^[11] In other works, the hyphen (do-beir, -beir) or colon (do:beir, :beir) may be used for this purpose.

Runic texts use either an interpunct-like or a colon-like punctuation mark to separate words. There are two Unicode characters dedicated for this:

• U+16EB ᛫ RUNIC SINGLE PUNCTUATION
• U+16EC ᛬ RUNIC MULTIPLE PUNCTUATION

Up to the mid twentieth century, and sporadically even much later, the interpunct could be found used as the decimal point in British publications, such as tables of constants (e.g., "π = 3·14159"). Conversely the multiplication sign was a full stop (period).^{[citation needed]}

In publications conforming to the standards of the International System of Units, as well as the multiplication sign (×), the centered dot (dot operator) or space (often typographically a non-breaking space) can be used as a multiplication sign.^{[citation needed]} Only a comma or full stop (period) may be used as a decimal marker.^{[citation needed]} The centered dot can be used when multiplying units, as in m·kg·s⁻² for the newton expressed in terms of SI base units.^{[citation needed]} In the United States, the use of a centered dot for the multiplication of numbers or values of quantities is discouraged by NIST.^[12]

In mathematics, a small middle dot can be used to represent multiplication; for example, ${\displaystyle x\cdot y}$ for multiplying ${\displaystyle x}$ by ${\textstyle y}$. When dealing with scalars, it is interchangeable with the multiplication sign (×), as long as the multiplication sign is between numerals such that it would not be mistaken as variable ${\textstyle x}$. For instance, ${\textstyle 2\cdot 3y}$ means the same thing as ${\textstyle 2\times 3y}$. However, when dealing with vectors, the dot operator denotes a dot product (e.g. ${\textstyle {\vec {x}}\cdot {\vec {y}}}$, a scalar), which is distinct from the cross product (e.g. ${\displaystyle {\vec {x}}\times {\vec {y}}}$, a vector).

Another usage of this symbol in mathematics is with functions, where the dot is used as a placeholder for a function argument, in order to distinguish between the (general form of the) function itself and the value or a specific form of a function evaluated at a given point or with given specifications.^[13][14] For example, ${\textstyle f(\cdot )}$ denotes the function ${\textstyle x\mapsto f(x)}$, and ${\displaystyle \theta (s,a,\cdot )}$ denotes a partial application, where the first two arguments are given and the third argument shall take any valid value on its domain.

The bullet operator, ∙, U+2219, is sometimes used to denote the "AND" relationship in formal logic.

In computing, the middle dot is usually displayed (but not printed) to indicate white space in various software applications such as word processing, graphic design, web layout, desktop publishing or software development programs. In some word processors, interpuncts are used to denote not only hard space or space characters, but also sometimes used to indicate a space when put in paragraph format to show indentations and spaces. This allows the user to see where white space is located in the document and what sizes of white space are used, since normally white space is invisible so tabs, spaces, non-breaking spaces and such are indistinguishable from one another.

In chemistry, the middle dot is used to separate the parts of formulas of addition compounds, mixture salts or solvates (typically hydrates), such as of copper(II) sulphate pentahydrate, CuSO₄·5H₂O. The middle dot should not be surrounded by spaces when indicating a chemical adduct.^[15]

A middot may be used as a consonant or modifier letter, rather than as punctuation, in transcription systems and in language orthographies. For such uses Unicode provides the code point U+A78F ꞏ LATIN LETTER SINOLOGICAL DOT.^[16]

In Americanist phonetic notation, the middot is a more common variant of the colon ⟨꞉⟩ used to indicate vowel length. It may be called a half-colon in such usage. Graphically, it may be high in the letter space (the top dot of the colon) or centered as the interpunct. From Americanist notation, it has been adopted into the orthographies of several languages, such as Washo.

In the writings of Franz Boas, the middot was used for palatal or palatalized consonants, e.g. ⟨kꞏ⟩ for IPA [c].

In the Sinological tradition of the 36 initials, the onset 影 (typically reconstructed as a glottal stop) may be transliterated with a middot ⟨ꞏ⟩, and the onset 喻 (typically reconstructed as a null onset) with an apostrophe ⟨ʼ⟩. Conventions vary, however, and it is common for 影 to be transliterated with the apostrophe. These conventions are used both for Chinese itself and for other scripts of China, such as ʼPhags-pa^[17] and Jurchen.

In the Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, a middle dot ⟨ᐧ⟩ indicates a syllable medial ⟨w⟩ in Cree and Ojibwe, ⟨y⟩ or ⟨yu⟩ in some of the Athapascan languages, and a syllable medial ⟨s⟩ in Blackfoot. However, depending on the writing tradition, the middle dot may appear after the syllable it modifies (which is found in the Western style) or before the syllable it modifies (which is found in the Northern and Eastern styles). In Unicode, the middle dot is encoded both as independent glyph U+1427 ᐧ CANADIAN SYLLABICS FINAL MIDDLE DOT or as part of a pre-composed letter, such as in U+143C ᐼ CANADIAN SYLLABICS PWI. In the Carrier syllabics subset, the middle dot Final indicates a glottal stop, but a centered dot diacritic on [ə]-position letters transform the vowel value to [i], for example: U+1650 ᙐ CANADIAN SYLLABICS CARRIER SE, U+1652 ᙒ CANADIAN SYLLABICS CARRIER SI.

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• Punctuation
• Syllabification
• Dot (disambiguation)

• Media related to Interpuncts at Wikimedia Commons