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hawkins410 wrote: »

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I assume you love the ⟨.⟩ like I do. Did you know:

In punctuation, the full stop (Commonwealth English) or period (American English) is a punctuation mark placed at the end of a sentence. The stop glyph is sometimes called a baseline dot because, typographically, it is a dot on the baseline. This term distinguishes the baseline dot from the interpunct (a raised dot).

The full stop glyph is also used for other purposes. It is often placed after an initial letter used to stand for a name, and sometimes placed after each individual letter in an initialism (for example, "U.S.A."). It also has multiple contexts in mathematics and computing, where it may be called dot or point (short for decimal point).

The full stop symbol derives from the Greek punctuation introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the 3rd century BC, In his system, there were a series of dots whose placement determined their meaning. The full stop at the end of a completed thought or expression was marked by a high dot ⟨˙⟩, called the stigmḕ teleía (στιγμὴ τελεία) or "terminal dot", The "middle dot" ⟨·⟩, the stigmḕ mésē (στιγμὴ μέση), marked a division in a thought occasioning a longer breath (essentially a semicolon) and the low dot ⟨.⟩, called the hypostigmḕ (ὑποστιγμή) or "underdot", marked a division in a thought occasioning a shorter breath (essentially a comma). In practice, scribes mostly employed the full stop; the others fell out of use and were later replaced by other symbols, From the 9th century, the full stop began appearing as a low mark instead of a high one; by the advent of printing in Western Europe, the low mark was regular and then universal.

The name "period" is first attested (as the Latin loanword peridos) in Ælfric of Eynsham's Old English treatment on grammar. There, it is distinguished from the full stop (the distinctio) and continues the Greek "underdot"'s earlier function as a comma between phrases. It shifted its meaning to a dot marking a full stop in the works of the 16th-century grammarians, In 19th-century texts, both British English and American English were consistent in their usage of the terms "period" and "full stop". The word "period" was used as a name for what printers often called the "full point" or the punctuation mark that was a dot on the baseline and used in several situations. The phrase "full stop" was only used to refer to the punctuation mark when it was used to terminate a sentence.