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Concept
Interpunct
Summary
An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. (Word-separating spaces did not appear until some time between 600 and 800 CE.) It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages and is present in Unicode as .
The multiplication dot (Unicode ) is frequently used in mathematical and scientific notation, and it may differ in appearance from the interpunct.
Various dictionaries use the interpunct (in this context, sometimes called a hyphenation point) to indicate where to split a word and insert a hyphen if the word doesn't fit on the line. There is also a separate Unicode character, .
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. 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 it is the widely-adopted international standard, and because the standard UK keyboard layout (for typewriters and computers) has only the full stop. The space dot is still used by some in handwriting.
In the early modern era, full stops (periods) were sometimes written as interpuncts (for example in the handwritten Mayflower Compact).
In the Shavian alphabet, interpuncts replace capitalization as the marker of proper nouns. The dot is placed at the beginning of a word.
The punt volat ("flying point") is used in Catalan between two Ls in cases where each belongs to a separate syllable, for example cel·la, "cell".
Official source
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