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Concept
Full stop
Summary
The full stop (Commonwealth English), period (North American English), or full point is a punctuation mark. It is used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence (as distinguished from a question or exclamation). This sentence-ending use, alone, defines the strictest sense of full stop. Although full stop technically applies only when the mark is used to end a sentence, the distinction – drawn since at least 1897 – is not maintained by all modern style guides and dictionaries.
The mark is also used, singly, to indicate omitted characters or, in a series, as an ellipsis (), to indicate omitted words. It may be placed after an initial letter used to abbreviate a word. It is often placed after each individual letter in acronyms and initialisms (e.g. "U.S.A."). However, the use of full stops after letters in an initialism or acronym is declining, and many of these without punctuation have become accepted norms (e.g., "UK" and "NATO"). This trend has progressed somewhat more slowly in the English dialect of the United States than in other English language dialects.
A full stop is frequently used at the end of word abbreviations – in British usage, primarily truncations like Rev., but not after contractions like Revd (in American English it is used in both cases).
In the English-speaking world, a punctuation mark identical to the full stop is used as the decimal separator and for other purposes, and may be called a point. In computing, it is called a dot. It is sometimes called a baseline dot to distinguish it from the interpunct (or middle dot).
The full stop symbol derives from the Greek punctuation introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the 3rd century . 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), while the low dot ⟨.
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