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Full stop

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A full stop or period (sometimes stop, full point, decimal 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 by far the more common 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.S.) 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. The end of the entire telegram would be noted by FULL STOP.

Abbreviations

A full stop is used after some abbreviations. If the abbreviation ends a declaratory sentence there is no additional full stop immediately following the full stop that ends the abbreviation (e.g., My name is Phil Simpson, Jr.), but in the case of an interrogative or exclamatory sentence a question or exclamation mark is still added. In most 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. However, British English also frequently abbreviates Professor as Prof, violating this rule. In American English, these are normally written Dr., Mrs., and Prof. In this use, the full stop is also occasionally known as a suspension mark.

In initialisms, full stops are somewhat more often placed after each initial in American English (e.g., U.S., U.S.S.R.) than in British English (e.g., US, USSR). However, for acronyms that are pronounced like words (e.g., NATO), full stops are omitted 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 between languages

British English and American English

The traditional convention in American English is for full stops to be included inside the quotation marks, even if they are not part of the quoted sentence, while the British style shows clearly whether or not the punctuation is part of the quoted phrase. The American rule is derived from typesetting while the British rule is grammatical (see below for more explanation). Although the terms American style and British style are used it is not as clear cut as that because at least one major British newspaper prefers typesetters' quotation (punctuation inside) and BBC News uses both styles, while scientific and technical publications, even in the U.S., almost universally use logical quotation (punctuation outside unless part of the source material), due to its precision.

As with many such differences, the American rule follows an older British standard. The typesetter’s rule was standard in early 19th century Britain; the grammatical rule was advocated by the extremely influential book The King’s English, by Fowler and Fowler.

  • “Carefree” means “free from care or anxiety.” (American style)
  • “Carefree” means “free from care or anxiety”. (British style)

In British style, both single and double quotation marks are possible, but more modern style guides like the BBC’s tend to prefer the latter.

Before the advent of mechanical type, the order of quotation marks with periods and commas was not given much consideration. The printing press required that the easily damaged smallest pieces of type for the comma and period be protected behind the more robust quotation marks. The U.S. style still adheres to this older tradition in formal writing but usually not in everyday use. Today, most areas of publication conform to one of the two standards above. However, in subjects such as chemistry and software documentation it is conventional to include only the precise quoted text within the quotation marks. This avoids ambiguity with regard to whether a punctuation mark belongs to the quotation:

Enter the URL as “www.wikipedia.org”, the name as “Wikipedia”, and click “OK”.
The URL starts with “www.wikipedia.”. This is followed by “org” or “com”.

References: Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition; Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford.

Spacing after full stop

In typewritten texts and other documents printed in fixed-width fonts, there is a convention among lay American English 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 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, and The Chicago Manual of Style. 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. 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.

With the advent of the World Wide Web, the broader distinction between full stop spacing and internal spacing in a sentence has become largely moot. 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   character entity (non-breaking space) to represent extra spaces, and this 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: "。" (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 and some 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). Some Indian languages also use the full-stop such as Marathi.

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.doc

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. Two dots (..) represent the parent directory of 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

Notes

External links



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Last updated on Thursday March 13, 2008 at 13:16:17 PDT (GMT -0700)
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