Interpunct facts for kids

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Interpunct
ˑ ꞏ ‧ IPA triangular half-colon modifier letter middot hyphenation point

An interpunct (·), also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, and centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in ancient Latin script. (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 code point .

The multiplication dot also known as dot operator, which is frequently used in mathematical and scientific notation, has an appearance similar to interpunct, but its exact shape and spacing differ.

In written language

Various dictionaries use the interpunct (in this context, sometimes called hyphenation point) to indicate syllabification within a word with multiple syllables.

English

In British typography, the space dot is an interpunct used as the formal decimal point. Its use is advocated by laws and by academic circles such as the Cambridge University History Faculty Style Guide and is mandated by some UK-based academic journals such as The Lancet. When the British currency was decimalised in 1971, the official advice issued was to write decimal amounts with a raised point (for example, £21·48) and to use a decimal point "on the line" only when typesetting constraints made it unavoidable. This usage, however, has been declining since the mid-1970s, as the importation of electronic typewriters, calculators and computers from the United States and Japan familiarised Britons with using full stops and made the space dot harder to typeset. The space dot may still be used frequently in handwriting, however.

In the early modern era, 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.