Full stop

A full stop or period (sometimes full point or dot), is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and several 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 not used by speakers in the United States and Canada. 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 word "period" is also used vernacularly, throughout the English-speaking world, to terminate a phrase or thought with finality and emphasis, as in "I told him I was leaving him, period." The term full stop is also used in this sense in many parts of the world.

Abbreviations

The period is also used after abbreviations, such as Mrs. & Ms. 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, "Dr" and "Mr" do not need a period, as they include both the first and last letter of the abbreviated word; but in American English, these are written "Dr." and "Mr." In this use, the period is also occasionally known as the suspension mark.

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 is used for the presentation of large numbers.

For more on this use see Decimal separator.

American & British English differences

When a quotation mark appears at the end of a sentence, the full stop is placed before it in American English, but at the end of the sentence in British English.

For example:

In American English the full stop appears inside "the quotation."
In British English the full stop appears outside "the quotation".

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

At the prompt type "ls -lad".

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 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 (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 also includes the MLA, APA, and the CMS. 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. 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 (the opposition would of course reply that this does nothing to satisfy the aforementioned saliency issue). Most modern typesetters, designers, and desktop publishers use only one space after a period, as do all mainstream publishers of books and journals."Use one space (not two) after these punctuation marks 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

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 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 commonly called a "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.

Notes

External links

Chicago Manual of Style 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

Typography | Punctuation

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Full stop