A middle dot (), also known as an interpoint, interpunct, raised dot, middot, medial point, or centered dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot that appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages. It was often used for interword separation in Classical Latin. (Word-separating spaces did not appear until some time between 600 and 800CE.)
The multiplication dot or "dot operator" is frequently used in mathematical and scientific notation, and it may differ in appearance from the middle dot.
In written language Hyphenation point Various dictionaries use a hyphenation point to "indicate correct word breaking", as in syl‧la‧bi‧fi‧ca‧tion. This practice allows the hyphen (which may otherwise be used by convention for this purpose) to be reserved exclusively for instances where a true hyphen is intended — for example, self-con‧scious, un‧self-con‧scious, and long-stand‧ing. Unicode provides a dedicated character for the hyphenation point, , "to be distinguished from , which has multiple semantics."
English
In the early modern era, full stops (periods) were sometimes written as mid points (for example in the depicted 1646 transcription of the Mayflower Compact).
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. In the 1960s, this usage was advocated by the School Mathematics Project, and continues to be used, albeit inconsistently, in primary-school mathematics education. When the pound sterling was decimalised in 1971, the official advice issued was to write decimal amounts with a raised point (for example, ) 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, not only because of that ruling but also because the standard UK keyboard layout (for typewriters and computers) has only the full stop.
In the artificially constructed Shavian alphabet, mid points are used instead of capitalization as the marker of proper nouns. The dot is placed at the beginning of a word.
Latin The 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 interpunctum, pointing either up or down. It may also appear as a mid-line comma, similar to the Greek practice of the time. The interpunctum fell out of use and Latin was then written for several centuries.
Franco-Provençal In Franco-Provençal (or Arpitan), the middle dot is used in order to distinguish between the following graphemes: ch·, pronounced , versus ch, pronounced j·, pronounced , versus j, pronounced g· before e, i, pronounced , versus g before e, i, pronounced
French In modern French, the middle dot is sometimes used for gender-neutral writing, as in for ("the male employees and the female employees").
Occitano-Romance
Catalan
The ("flying point") is used in Catalan between two Ls in cases where each belongs to a separate syllable, for example , "cell". This distinguishes such "geminate Ls" (), which are pronounced , from "double L" (), which are written without the flying point and are pronounced . In situations where the flying point is unavailable, periods (as in ) or hyphens (as in ) 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 in the Spanish (Spain) layout or with 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 key. It appears in Unicode as the precomposed letters (U+013F) and (U+0140), but they are compatibility characters and are not frequently used or recommended.Unicode Latin Extended A code chart p.13
Gascon In Gascon, the middle dot (punt interior, literally, "inner dot", or ponch naut for "high / upper point") is used to distinguish the following graphemes: s·h, pronounced , versus sh, pronounced , for example, in des·har 'to undo' vs deishar 'to leave' n·h, pronounced , versus nh, pronounced , 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 middle dot are used to denote certain elisions that were not originally marked. The apostrophe is used with proclitic forms and the middle dot 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):
Bela Domna·l vostre cors gens E·lh vostre bel olh m'an conquis, E·l doutz esgartz e lo clars vis, E·l vostre bels essenhamens, Que, can be m'en pren esmansa, De beutat no·us trob egansa: La genser etz c'om posc'e·l mon chauzir, O no·i vei clar dels olhs ab que·us remir.
Domna·l = Domna, lo ("Lady, the": singular definite article) E·lh = E li ("And the": plural definite article) E·l = E lo ("And the") E·l = E lo ("And the")
No·us = Non vos ("(do) not... you": direct object pronoun) E·l = En lo ("in the") No·i = Non i ("(do) not... there") // Que·us = Que vos ("that (I)... you")
O pretty lady, all your grace and eyes of beauty conquered me, sweet glance and brightness of your face and all your nature has to tell so if I make an appraisal I find no one like in beauty: most pleasing to be found in all the world or else the eyes I see you with have dimmed.
Greek Ancient Greek lacked word spacing or middle dots but instead ran all the letters together. By Late Antiquity, various marks were used to separate words, including "a high dot (stigme teleia, "final dot") corresponding to our full stop; a low dot (hypostigme, "underdot") corresponding to our semicolon; a middle dot (, 'middle dot') corresponding to our comma".Alternative archive (2012-08-06): The Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria created these marks as part of "the earliest official system of punctuation, devised [in] the 3rd century BC." It later fell out of use.
In modern Greek, the ano teleia mark (; also known as ) is the infrequently-encountered Greek semicolon and is properly romanized as such. [Ellīnikós Organismós Typopoíīsīs, "Hellenic Organization for Standardization"]. [ELOT 743, 2ī Ekdosī, "ELOT 743, "]. ELOT (Athens), 2001. . In Greek text, Unicode provides the code point ;Unicode. "Unicode Greek code chart ", 36. however, it is canonically equivalent to . On this matter, the Unicode core specification says:
Old Irish In many linguistic works discussing Old Irish (but not in actual Old Irish manuscripts), the middle dot is used to separate a pretonic preverbal element from the stressed syllable of the verb, e.g. "gives". It is also used in citing the verb forms used after such preverbal elements (the prototonic forms), e.g. "carries", to distinguish them from forms used without preverbs, e.g. "carries". In other works, the hyphen (, ) or colon (, ) may be used for this purpose.
Ethiopic The Geʽez (Ethiopic) script traditionally separates words with a grapheme of two vertically aligned dots, like a colon, but with larger dots: (For example 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.
Tibetan
In Tibetan the middle dot, called (), is used as a morpheme delimiter.
Chinese The middle dot or "partition sign" is used in Chinese (which generally lacks spacing between characters) to mark divisions in words transliterated from phonogram languages, particularly names. Some fonts and software render as double-width if it is between double-width characters, China's standards recommend half-width between Arabic numerals.GB/T 15834-1985 In Taiwan, the formal standard, as defined by CNS 11643, historically specified , while should be primarily used in Japanese contexts for separating katakana words. 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 and George W. Bush as .第五页 中文出版物夹用英文的编辑规范 CY/T 154—2017 https://www.nppa.gov.cn/xxgk/fdzdgknr/hybz/202210/P020221004608768453140.pdf 第29页 https://skxb.jsu.edu.cn/attached/file/20210105/20210105201153_839.pdf Titles and other translated words are not similarly marked: Genghis Khan and Elizabeth II are simply and .
The partition sign is also used to separate book and chapter titles when they are mentioned consecutively: book first and then chapter.
Hokkien 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 . 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.
Japanese
Middle dots are often used to separate transcribed foreign names or words written in katakana. For example, "Beautiful Sunday" becomes (). 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: , with a fixed width that is the same as most kana characters, known as fullwidth.
The middle dot also has a number of other uses in Japanese, including the following: to separate titles, names and positions: (Assistant Section Head · Suzuki); as a decimal point when writing numbers in kanji: ; as a slash when writing for "or" in abbreviations: ; in place of hyphens, dashes and colons when writing vertically; and in song lyrics to add a brief pause between syllables.
Korean Middle dots 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 , "American–Soviet relations". The use of middle dots has declined in years of digital typography and especially being replaced informally by slashes but, in the strictest sense, a slash cannot replace a middle dot in Korean typography.
() is used more than the Unicode middle dot when a mid-line dot is to be used in Korean typography though araea is technically not a punctuation symbol but actually an obsolete Hangu jamo. Because araea is a full-width letter, it looks better than middle dot between Hangul. Araea is drawn like the middle dot in Windows default Korean fonts such as Batang.
Runes Runic texts use a punctuation mark like either a middle dot or a colon, to separate words. There are two Unicode characters dedicated for this:
In mathematics and science