Full stop
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A full stop or period, also called a full point, is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and several other languages. A period consists of a small dot placed at the end of a line of text, thus: "." (sans quotes).
The term full stop is less common in the United States and Canada, but is 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 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 full stop is also used, vernacularly, to terminate a phrase or thought with finality and emphasis, as in "I told him I was leaving him, full stop." The term period is used in the same sense in North America. The British Prime Minister Tony Blair, however, used the term 'period' in an answer in response to a question over the UK's EU budgetary rebate during Prime Minister's Question Time in the UK Parliament on 8 June 2005: "Will the Prime Minister tell us if the UK rebate is negotiable? The Prime Minister: The UK rebate will remain and we will not negotiate it away. Period". (from Hansard)
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Abbreviations
The period is also used after abbreviations, such as Mrs. & Ms. If the abbreviation is ending a declaratory sentence a second period is not needed (e.g. My name is Phil Simpson Jr.), but in the case of an interogative or exclamatory sentence a question or exclamation mark is needed. In British English, "Dr" and "Mr" do not need a full stop, as they include both the first and last letter of the abbreviation; but in American English, these are written "Dr." and "Mr." In this use, the period is also occasionally known as the suspension mark.
Decimal point
The same glyph is very often used, rather than a mid-line point, as a decimal point (or dot) in English-speaking countries. For example:
- 3.14159
For more on this use see Decimal separator.
Spacing after full stop
In typewritten texts and other documents printed in uniform-width fonts, there is a convention among laymen 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.
In modern American English typographical usage, debate has arisen around the proper number of trailing spaces after a full stop 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 keyboards and word-processing software 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 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. Many prescriptivists, 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. Some, however, accept that in modern word-processing the single space is better because 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. Most modern typesetters, designers, and desktop publishers use only one space after a period as do all mainstream publishers of books and journals.
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, and ignores it when rendering the page. A common workaround for this is the use of to represent extra spaces, and is done automatically by some WYSIWYG editors.
Asian full stop
In some Asian languages, notably Chinese and Japanese, a small circle is used instead of a solid dot: "。". 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 these languages, the partition sign "·" (間隔號 jiāngéhào) is often used to separate the given name and the family name in other languages: for example, William Shakespeare is represented in Chinese as 威廉‧莎士比亞 (Weilian·Shashibiya), and in Japanese as ウィリアム・シェイクスピア (Uiriamu·Sheikusupia), with a partition sign inserted between the characters of "William" and those of "Shakespeare".
The Chinese partition sign is also used to separate book title and chapter title when they are mentioned consecutively (with book title first, then chapter).
Computing use
In computing, the period is often used as a delimiter, also called "dot", for example in DNS lookups and file names. For example:
- www.example.com
In computer programming, the full stop corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 46, or 0x2E.
See dot for other dots or periods
External links
- Chicago Manual of Style on one space versus two after sentences
- FontSite typographic design center on one space versus two after sentences
