98-531: A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their names, that vary between British and American English . "Brackets", without further qualification, are in British English the ( ... ) marks and in American English
196-463: A punctus was placed at one of several heights to denote rhetorical divisions in speech: In addition, the Greeks used the paragraphos (or gamma ) to mark the beginning of sentences, marginal diples to mark quotations, and a koronis to indicate the end of major sections. During the 1st century BC, Romans also made occasional use of symbols to indicate pauses, but by the 4th century AD
294-460: A verbose original: "To the extent that policymakers and elite opinion in general have made use of economic analysis at all, they have, as the saying goes, done so the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination", can be quoted succinctly as: "[P]olicymakers [...] have made use of economic analysis [...] the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination." When nested parentheses are needed, brackets are sometimes used as
392-514: A clown had exploded. A flock of sparrows – some of them juveniles – alighted and sang. The French and Indian War (1754–1763) was fought in western Pennsylvania and along the present US–Canada border Seven social sins: politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice. The figure dash ‒ ( U+2012 ‒ FIGURE DASH ) has
490-408: A different order of operations . For example: in the usual order of algebraic operations, 4 × 3 + 2 equals 14, since the multiplication is done before the addition . However, 4 × (3 + 2) equals 20, because the parentheses override normal precedence, causing the addition to be done first. Some authors follow the convention in mathematical equations that, when parentheses have one level of nesting,
588-431: A long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline . The most common versions are the en dash – , generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign ; the em dash — , longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontal bar ― , whose length varies across typefaces but tends to be between those of
686-403: A parenthesis. Again, the parenthesis implies that the meaning and flow of the bracketed phrase is supplemental to the rest of the text and the whole would be unchanged were the parenthesized sentences removed. The term refers to the syntax rather than the enclosure method: the same clause in the form "Mrs. Pennyfarthing – What? Yes, that was her name! – was my landlady"
784-511: A sentence, a function for which normal question and exclamation marks can also be used, but which may be considered obsolescent. The patent application entered into the national phase only in Canada. It was advertised as lapsing in Australia on 27 January 1994 and in Canada on 6 November 1995. Other proposed punctuation marks include: Em dash The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of
882-510: A separate written form distinct from the spoken form of the language. Ancient Chinese classical texts were transmitted without punctuation. However, many Warring States period bamboo texts contain the symbols ⟨└⟩ and ⟨▄⟩ indicating the end of a chapter and full stop , respectively. By the Song dynasty , the addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common. During antiquity, most scribes in
980-400: A single character (-), sometimes repeated to represent a long dash. The spaces of different widths available to professional typesetters were generally replaced by a single full-character width space, with typefaces monospaced . In some cases a typewriter keyboard did not include an exclamation point (!), which could otherwise be constructed by the overstrike of an apostrophe and a period;
1078-440: A space in, for example, "11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m." or "July 9–August 17" . En dashes can be used instead of pairs of commas that mark off a nested clause or phrase. They can also be used around parenthetical expressions – such as this one – rather than the em dashes preferred by some publishers. The en dash can also signify a rhetorical pause. For example, an opinion piece from The Guardian
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#17328690721891176-500: A substitute for the inner pair of parentheses within the outer pair. When deeper levels of nesting are needed, convention is to alternate between parentheses and brackets at each level. Alternatively, empty square brackets can also indicate omitted material, usually single letter only. The original, "Reading is also a process and it also changes you." can be rewritten in a quote as: It has been suggested that reading can "also change[] you". In translated works, brackets are used to signify
1274-459: A thin space. In Canadian French , this is only the case for ⟨:⟩ . In Greek , the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point ⟨·⟩ , known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Georgian , three dots ⟨ ჻ ⟩ were formerly used as a sentence or paragraph divider. It
1372-835: A thinking pause, interruption, mid-speech realization, or change of subject. The dashes are variously longer ⸺ (as in King Lear reprinted 1619) or composed of hyphens --- (as in Othello printed 1622); moreover, the dashes are often, but not always, prefixed by a comma, colon, or semicolon. In 1733, in Jonathan Swift 's On Poetry , the terms break and dash are attested for ⸺ and — marks: Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline; Be mindful, when Invention fails; To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails. Your poem finish'd, next your Care Is needful, to transcribe it fair. In modern Wit all printed Trash,
1470-422: Is Set off with num'rous Breaks ⸺and Dashes — Usage varies both within English and within other languages, but the usual conventions for the most common dashes in printed English text are these: Glitter, felt, yarn, and buttons—his kitchen looked as if a clown had exploded. A flock of sparrows—some of them juveniles—alighted and sang. Glitter, felt, yarn, and buttons – his kitchen looked as if
1568-654: Is a difference between something named for a parallel/coordinate relationship between two people – for example, Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein – and something named for a single person who had a compound surname , which may be written with a hyphen or a space but not an en dash – for example, the Lennard-Jones potential [hyphen] is named after one person ( John Lennard-Jones ), as are Bence Jones proteins and Hughlings Jackson syndrome . Copyeditors use dictionaries (general, medical, biographical, and geographical) to confirm
1666-472: Is a modern innovation; pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. Hebrew , which is also written from right to left, uses the same characters as in English, ⟨,⟩ and ⟨?⟩ . Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi , both written using Devanagari , started using the vertical bar ⟨ । ⟩ to end a line of prose and double vertical bars ⟨॥⟩ in verse. Punctuation
1764-539: Is a notation that was pioneered by Berzelius , who wanted chemical formulae to more resemble algebraic notation, with brackets enclosing groups that could be multiplied (e.g. in 3(AlO 2 + 2SO 3 ) the 3 multiplies everything within the parentheses). In chemical nomenclature , parentheses are used to distinguish structural features and multipliers for clarity, for example in the polymer poly(methyl methacrylate) . [ and ] are square brackets in both British and American English, but are also more simply brackets in
1862-433: Is also a parenthesis. (In non-specialist usage, the term "parenthetical phrase" is more widely understood.) In phonetics , parentheses are used for indistinguishable or unidentified utterances. They are also seen for silent articulation (mouthing), where the expected phonetic transcription is derived from lip-reading, and with periods to indicate silent pauses, for example (...) or (2 sec) . An unpaired right parenthesis
1960-778: Is also used in British English. Parentheses contain adjunctive material that serves to clarify (in the manner of a gloss ) or is aside from the main point. A comma before or after the material can also be used, though if the sentence contains commas for other purposes, visual confusion may result. A dash before and after the material is also sometimes used. Parentheses may be used in formal writing to add supplementary information, such as "Senator John McCain ( R - Arizona) spoke at length". They can also indicate shorthand for " either singular or plural " for nouns, e.g. "the claim(s)". It can also be used for gender-neutral language , especially in languages with grammatical gender , e.g. "(s)he agreed with his/her physician" (the slash in
2058-441: Is called an em dash because it is one em wide, a length that varies depending on the font size. One em is the same length as the font's height (which is typically measured in points ). So in 9-point type, an em dash is nine points wide, while in 24-point type the em dash is 24 points wide. By comparison, the en dash, with its 1 en width, is in most fonts either a half-em wide or the width of an upper-case "N". The em dash
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#17328690721892156-500: Is encoded in Unicode as U+2014 (decimal 8212) and represented in HTML by the named character entity — . The em dash is used in several ways. It is primarily used in places where a set of parentheses or a colon might otherwise be used, and it can also show an abrupt change in thought (or an interruption in speech) or be used where a full stop (period) is too strong and a comma
2254-615: Is entitled: Who is to blame for the sweltering weather? My kids say it's boomers – and me In these situations, en dashes must have a single space on each side. In most uses of en dashes, such as when used in indicating ranges, they are typeset closed up to the adjacent words or numbers. Examples include "the 1914–18 war" or "the Dover–Calais crossing". It is only when en dashes are used in setting off parenthetical expressions – such as this one – that they take spaces around them. For more on
2352-443: Is in any way altered, the alterations are enclosed in square brackets within the quotation to show that the quotation is not exactly as given, or to add an annotation . For example: The Plaintiff asserted his cause is just, stating, [m]y causes is [ sic ] just. In the original quoted sentence, the word "my" was capitalized: it has been modified in the quotation given and the change signalled with brackets. Similarly, where
2450-404: Is in doubt". Or one can quote the original statement "I hate to do laundry" with a (sometimes grammatical) modification inserted: He "hate[s] to do laundry". Additionally, a small letter can be replaced by a capital one, when the beginning of the original printed text is being quoted in another piece of text or when the original text has been omitted for succinctness— for example, when referring to
2548-529: Is in the 1954 volume of the Appeal Cases reports, although the decision may have been given in 1953 or earlier. Compare with: Punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between
2646-590: Is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of women to men). Similar changes in meaning can be achieved in spoken forms of most languages by using elements of speech such as suprasegmentals . The rules of punctuation vary with the language, location , register , and time . In online chat and text messages punctuation is used tachygraphically , especially among younger users. Punctuation marks, especially spacing , were not needed in logographic or syllabic (such as Chinese and Mayan script ) texts because disambiguation and emphasis could be communicated by employing
2744-436: Is often used as part of a label in an ordered list, such as this one: a) educational testing, b) technical writing and diagrams, c) market research , and d) elections . Traditionally in accounting , contra amounts are placed in parentheses. A debit balance account in a series of credit balances will have parenthesis and vice versa. Parentheses are used in mathematical notation to indicate grouping, often inducing
2842-441: Is plausible is a judgment call. AMA style retains the en dashes in the following examples: As discussed above, the en dash is sometimes recommended instead of a hyphen in compound adjectives where neither part of the adjective modifies the other—that is, when each modifies the noun, as in love–hate relationship . The Chicago Manual of Style ( CMOS ), however, limits the use of the en dash to two main purposes: That is,
2940-434: Is preferable to using "a voltage of 50–100 V". Relatedly, in ranges that include negative numbers, "to" is used to avoid ambiguity or awkwardness (for example, "temperatures ranged from −18 °C to −34 °C"). It is also considered poor style (best avoided) to use the en dash in place of the words "to" or "and" in phrases that follow the forms from X to Y and between X and Y . The en dash
3038-406: Is represented by a colon, and vice versa; the exclamation mark is represented by a diagonal similar to a tilde ⟨~⟩ , while the question mark ⟨՞⟩ resembles an unclosed circle placed after the last vowel of the word. Arabic , Urdu , and Persian —written from right to left—use a reversed question mark: ⟨؟⟩ , and a reversed comma: ⟨،⟩ . This
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3136-407: Is sometimes used as a substitute for the minus sign , when the minus sign character is not available since the en dash is usually the same width as a plus sign and is often available when the minus sign is not; see below . For example, the original 8-bit Macintosh Character Set had an en dash, useful for the minus sign, years before Unicode with a dedicated minus sign was available. The hyphen-minus
3234-500: Is still sometimes used in calligraphy. Spanish and Asturian (both of them Romance languages used in Spain ) use an inverted question mark ⟨ ¿ ⟩ at the beginning of a question and the normal question mark at the end, as well as an inverted exclamation mark ⟨ ¡ ⟩ at the beginning of an exclamation and the normal exclamation mark at the end. Armenian uses several punctuation marks of its own. The full stop
3332-466: Is too weak (similar to that of a semicolon). Em dashes are also used to set off summaries or definitions. Common uses and definitions are cited below with examples. It may indicate an interpolation stronger than that demarcated by parentheses, as in the following from Nicholson Baker 's The Mezzanine (the degree of difference is subjective). In a related use, it may visually indicate the shift between speakers when they overlap in speech. For example,
3430-531: Is used to contrast values or illustrate a relationship between two things. Examples of this usage include: A distinction is often made between "simple" attributive compounds (written with a hyphen) and other subtypes (written with an en dash); at least one authority considers name pairs, where the paired elements carry equal weight, as in the Taft–Hartley Act to be "simple", while others consider an en dash appropriate in instances such as these to represent
3528-405: Is usually too narrow to make a typographically acceptable minus sign. However, the en dash cannot be used for a minus sign in programming languages because the syntax usually requires a hyphen-minus. Either the en dash or the em dash may be used as a bullet at the start of each item in a bulleted list. The em dash , em rule , or mutton dash — is longer than an en dash . The character
3626-600: The punctus , a comma-shaped mark, and a 7-shaped mark ( comma positura ), often used in combination. The same marks could be used in the margin to mark off quotations. In the late 8th century a different system emerged in France under the Carolingian dynasty . Originally indicating how the voice should be modulated when chanting the liturgy , the positurae migrated into any text meant to be read aloud, and then to all manuscripts. Positurae first reached England in
3724-932: The APA style (named after the American Psychological Association) uses an en dash in ranges, but the AMA style (named after the American Medical Association) uses a hyphen: Some style guides (including the Guide for the Use of the International System of Units ( SI ) and the AMA Manual of Style ) recommend that, when a number range might be misconstrued as subtraction, the word "to" should be used instead of an en dash. For example, "a voltage of 50 V to 100 V"
3822-494: The Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud, so the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation , various punctuation marks ( diple , paragraphos , simplex ductus ), and an early version of initial capitals ( litterae notabiliores ). Jerome and his colleagues, who made a translation of the Bible into Latin ,
3920-648: The CMOS favors hyphens in instances where some other guides suggest en dashes, with the 16th edition explaining that "Chicago's sense of the en dash does not extend to between ", to rule out its use in "US–Canadian relations". In these two uses, en dashes normally do not have spaces around them. Some make an exception when they believe avoiding spaces may cause confusion or look odd. For example, compare "12 June – 3 July" with "12 June–3 July" . However, other authorities disagree and state there should be no space between an en dash and adjacent text. These authorities would not use
4018-627: The Indian subcontinent , ⟨ :- ⟩ is sometimes used in place of colon or after a subheading. Its origin is unclear, but could be a remnant of the British Raj . Another punctuation common in the Indian Subcontinent for writing monetary amounts is the use of ⟨/-⟩ or ⟨/=⟩ after the number. For example, Rs. 20/- or Rs. 20/= implies 20 whole rupees. Thai , Khmer , Lao and Burmese did not use punctuation until
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4116-511: The International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (ICNP) requires the use of the abbreviation "subgen". as well, e.g., Acetobacter (subgen. Gluconoacetobacter ) liquefaciens . Parentheses are used in chemistry to denote a repeated substructure within a molecule, e.g. HC(CH 3 ) 3 ( isobutane ) or, similarly, to indicate the stoichiometry of ionic compounds with such substructures: e.g. Ca(NO 3 ) 2 ( calcium nitrate ). This
4214-622: The Vulgate ( c. AD 400 ), employed a layout system based on established practices for teaching the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero . Under his layout per cola et commata every sense-unit was indented and given its own line. This layout was solely used for biblical manuscripts during the 5th–9th centuries but was abandoned in favor of punctuation. In the 7th–8th centuries Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes, whose native languages were not derived from Latin , added more visual cues to render texts more intelligible. Irish scribes introduced
4312-666: The [ ... ] marks. Other minor bracket shapes exist, such as (for example) slash or diagonal brackets used by linguists to enclose phonemes . Brackets are typically deployed in symmetric pairs, and an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'right' bracket or, alternatively, an "opening bracket" or "closing bracket", respectively, depending on the directionality of the context. In casual writing and in technical fields such as computing or linguistic analysis of grammar , brackets nest , with segments of bracketed material containing embedded within them other further bracketed sub-segments. The number of opening brackets matches
4410-595: The at sign (@) has gone from an obscure character mostly used by sellers of bulk commodities (10 pounds @$ 2.00 per pound), to a very common character in common use for both technical routing and an abbreviation for "at". The tilde (~), in moveable type only used in combination with vowels, for mechanical reasons ended up as a separate key on mechanical typewriters , and like @ it has been put to completely new uses. There are two major styles of punctuation in English: British or American. These two styles differ mainly in
4508-505: The em dash is currently used in alternatives, such as "parenthesis)(parentheses". Examples of this usage can be seen in editions of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage . Parentheses may be nested (generally with one set (such as this) inside another set). This is not commonly used in formal writing (though sometimes other brackets [especially square brackets] will be used for one or more inner set of parentheses [in other words, secondary {or even tertiary} phrases can be found within
4606-449: The en and em dashes. Typical uses of dashes are to mark a break in a sentence, to set off an explanatory remark (similar to parenthesis), or to show spans of time or ranges of values. The em dash is sometimes used as a leading character to identify the source of a quoted text. In the early 17th century, in Okes -printed plays of William Shakespeare , dashes are attested that indicate
4704-477: The eponymity (and thus the styling) for specific terms, given that no one can know them all offhand. Preference for an en dash instead of a hyphen in these coordinate/relationship/connection types of terms is a matter of style, not inherent orthographic "correctness"; both are equally "correct", and each is the preferred style in some style guides. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary of
4802-557: The semicolon , making occasional use of parentheses , and creating the modern comma by lowering the virgule. By 1566, Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax . By the 19th century, punctuation in the Western world had evolved "to classify the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight". Cecil Hartley's poem identifies their relative values: The stop point out, with truth,
4900-537: The 12th century scribes also began entering diples (sometimes double) within the column of text. The amount of printed material and its readership began to increase after the invention of moveable type in Europe in the 1450s. Martin Luther 's German Bible translation was one of the first mass printed works, he used only virgule , full stop and less than one percent question marks as punctuation. The focus of punctuation still
4998-592: The 1960s, it failed to achieve widespread use. Nevertheless, it and its inverted form were given code points in Unicode: U+203D ‽ INTERROBANG , U+2E18 ⸘ INVERTED INTERROBANG . The six additional punctuation marks proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l'Oiseau ("Let's pluck the bird", 1966) could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis . These were: An international patent application
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#17328690721895096-454: The 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically, according to their weight. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin , could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis . In rare cases, the meaning of a text can be changed substantially by using different punctuation, such as in "woman, without her man, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men to women), contrasted with "woman: without her, man
5194-463: The English Language , the AMA Manual of Style , and Dorland's medical reference works use hyphens, not en dashes, in coordinate terms (such as " blood-brain barrier "), in eponyms (such as " Cheyne-Stokes respiration ", " Kaplan-Meier method "), and so on. In other styles, AP Style or Chicago Style, the en dash is used to describe two closely related entities in a formal manner. In English,
5292-499: The Greek théseis —called distinctiones in Latin —prevailed, as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville (7th century). Latin texts were sometimes laid out per capitula , where each sentence was placed on its own line. Diples were used, but by the late period these often degenerated into comma-shaped marks. Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of
5390-454: The West wrote in scriptio continua , i.e. without punctuation delimiting word boundaries . Around the 5th century BC, the Greeks began using punctuation consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually a dicolon or tricolon—as an aid in the oral delivery of texts. After 200 BC, Greek scribes adopted the théseis system invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium , where a single dot called
5488-457: The Wolfram language, parentheses are used to indicate grouping – for example, with pure anonymous functions. If it is desired to include the subgenus when giving the scientific name of an animal species or subspecies , the subgenus's name is provided in parentheses between the genus name and the specific epithet . For instance, Polyphylla ( Xerasiobia ) alba is a way to cite
5586-400: The adoption of punctuation from the West in the 20th century. Blank spaces are more frequent than full stops or commas. In 1962, American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed the interrobang (‽), a combination of the question mark and exclamation point, to mark rhetorical questions or questions stated in a tone of disbelief. Although the new punctuation mark was widely discussed in
5684-475: The choice of em versus en in this context, see En dash versus em dash . When an en dash is unavailable in a particular character encoding environment—as in the ASCII character set—there are some conventional substitutions. Often two consecutive hyphens are the substitute. The en dash is encoded in Unicode as U+2013 (decimal 8211) and represented in HTML by the named character entity – . The en dash
5782-455: The citation of law reports to identify parallel citations to non-official reporters. For example: Chronicle Pub. Co. v Superior Court (1998) 54 Cal.2d 548, [7 Cal.Rptr. 109] In some other countries (such as England and Wales ), square brackets are used to indicate that the year is part of the citation and parentheses are used to indicate the year the judgment was given. For example: National Coal Board v England [1954] AC 403 This case
5880-512: The closing quotation mark regardless. This rule varies for other punctuation marks; for example, American English follows the British English rule when it comes to semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points. The serial comma is used much more often in the United States than in the UK. Other languages of Europe use much the same punctuation as English. The similarity is so strong that
5978-476: The colon, and the full point terminating the sentence. The marks of interrogation and admiration were introduced many years after. The introduction of electrical telegraphy with a limited set of transmission codes and typewriters with a limited set of keys influenced punctuation subtly. For example, curved quotes and apostrophes were all collapsed into two characters (' and "). The hyphen , minus sign , and dashes of various widths have been collapsed into
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#17328690721896076-485: The em dash is used this way in Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 : Lord Cardinal! if thou think'st on heaven's bliss, Hold up thy hand, make signal of that hope.— He dies, and makes no sign! This is a quotation dash . It may be distinct from an em dash in its coding (see horizontal bar ). It may be used to indicate turns in a dialogue, in which case each dash starts a paragraph. It replaces other quotation marks and
6174-473: The en dash is usually used instead of a hyphen in compound (phrasal) attributives in which one or both elements is itself a compound, especially when the compound element is an open compound , meaning it is not itself hyphenated. This manner of usage may include such examples as: The disambiguating value of the en dash in these patterns was illustrated by Strunk and White in The Elements of Style with
6272-517: The enclosed text is italic. However, in other languages like German , if brackets enclose text in italics, they are usually also set in italics. ( and ) are parentheses / p ə ˈ r ɛ n θ ɪ s iː z / (singular parenthesis / p ə ˈ r ɛ n θ ɪ s ɪ s / ) in American English, and either round brackets or simply brackets in British English. They are also known as "parens" / p ə ˈ r ɛ n z / , "circle brackets", or "smooth brackets". In formal writing, "parentheses"
6370-580: The few variations may confuse a native English reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French and Russian , quotes would appear as: « Je suis fatigué. » (In French, the quotation marks are spaced from the enclosed material; in Russian they are not.) In the French of France and Belgium , the marks ⟨:⟩ , ⟨;⟩ , ⟨?⟩ and ⟨!⟩ are preceded by
6468-405: The figure dash glyph. The en dash , en rule , or nut dash – is traditionally half the width of an em dash . In modern fonts, the length of the en dash is not standardized, and the en dash is often more than half the width of the em dash. The widths of en and em dashes have also been specified as being equal to those of the uppercase letters N and M, respectively, and at other times to
6566-517: The following example: When Chattanooga News and Chattanooga Free Press merged, the joint company was inaptly named Chattanooga News-Free Press (using a hyphen), which could be interpreted as meaning that their newspapers were news-free. An exception to the use of en dashes is usually made when prefixing an already- hyphenated compound ; an en dash is generally avoided as a distraction in this case. Examples of this include: An en dash can be retained to avoid ambiguity, but whether any ambiguity
6664-491: The greater use and finally standardization of punctuation, which showed the relationships of words with each other: where one sentence ends and another begins, for example. The introduction of a standard system of punctuation has also been attributed to the Venetian printers Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They have been credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop (period), inventing
6762-413: The guidance of the reader produced the colon and full point. In process of time, the comma was added, which was then merely a perpendicular line, proportioned to the body of the letter. These three points were the only ones used until the close of the fifteenth century, when Aldo Manuccio gave a better shape to the comma, and added the semicolon; the comma denoting the shortest pause, the semicolon next, then
6860-464: The horizontal bar of the plus sign . In informal usage, the hyphen-minus - ( U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS ), provided as standard on most keyboards, is often used instead of the figure dash. In TeX , the standard fonts have no figure dash; however, the digits normally all have the same width as the en dash, so an en dash can be a substitution for the figure dash. In XeLaTeX , one can use \char"2012 . The Linux Libertine font also has
6958-681: The inner pair are parentheses and the outer pair are square brackets. Example: Parentheses are included in the syntaxes of many programming languages . Typically needed to denote an argument; to tell the compiler what data type the Method/Function needs to look for first in order to initialise. In some cases, such as in LISP , parentheses are a fundamental construct of the language. They are also often used for scoping functions and operators and for arrays. In syntax diagrams they are used for grouping, such as in extended Backus–Naur form . In Mathematica and
7056-518: The late 10th century, probably during the Benedictine reform movement, but was not adopted until after the Norman conquest . The original positurae were the punctus , punctus elevatus , punctus versus , and punctus interrogativus , but a fifth symbol, the punctus flexus , was added in the 10th century to indicate a pause of a value between the punctus and punctus elevatus . In
7154-485: The late 11th/early 12th century the punctus versus disappeared and was taken over by the simple punctus (now with two distinct values). The late Middle Ages saw the addition of the virgula suspensiva (slash or slash with a midpoint dot) which was often used in conjunction with the punctus for different types of pauses. Direct quotations were marked with marginal diples, as in Antiquity, but from at least
7252-463: The latter. An older name for these brackets is "crotchets". Square brackets are often used to insert explanatory material or to mark where a [word or] passage was omitted from an original material by someone other than the original author, or to mark modifications in quotations. In transcribed interviews, sounds, responses and reactions that are not words but that can be described are set off in square brackets — "... [laughs] ...". When quoted material
7350-410: The main parenthetical sentence]). A parenthesis in rhetoric and linguistics refers to the entire bracketed text, not just to the enclosing marks used (so all the text in this set of round brackets may be described as "a parenthesis"). Taking as an example the sentence "Mrs. Pennyfarthing (What? Yes, that was her name!) was my landlady.", the explanatory phrase between the parentheses is itself called
7448-426: The number of closing brackets in such cases. Various forms of brackets are used in mathematics , with specific mathematical meanings, often for denoting specific mathematical functions and subformulas . Angle brackets or chevrons ⟨ ⟩ were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English . Erasmus coined the term lunula to refer to the round brackets or parentheses ( ) recalling
7546-455: The original Morse code did not have an exclamation point. These simplifications have been carried forward into digital writing, with teleprinters and the ASCII character set essentially supporting the same characters as typewriters. Treatment of whitespace in HTML discouraged the practice (in English prose) of putting two full spaces after a full stop, since a single or double space would appear
7644-510: The parallel relationship, as in the McCain–Feingold bill or Bose–Einstein statistics . When an act of the U.S. Congress is named using the surnames of the senator and representative who sponsored it, the hyphen-minus is used in the short title ; thus, the short title of Public Law 111–203 is "The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act", with a hyphen-minus rather than an en dash between "Dodd" and "Frank". However, there
7742-412: The practice of word separation . Likewise, insular scribes adopted the distinctiones system while adapting it for minuscule script (so as to be more prominent) by using not differing height but rather a differing number of marks—aligned horizontally (or sometimes triangularly)—to signify a pause's duration: one mark for a minor pause, two for a medium one, and three for a major one. Most common were
7840-489: The punctuation of traditional typesetting, writing forms like text messages tend to use the simplified ASCII style of punctuation, with the addition of new non-text characters like emoji . Informal text speak tends to drop punctuation when not needed, including some ways that would be considered errors in more formal writing. In the computer era, punctuation characters were recycled for use in programming languages and URLs . Due to its use in email and Twitter handles,
7938-499: The quotation contained a grammatical error (is/are), the quoting author signalled that the error was in the original with "[ sic ]" (Latin for 'thus'). A bracketed ellipsis , [...], is often used to indicate omitted material: "I'd like to thank [several unimportant people] for their tolerance [...]" Bracketed comments inserted into a quote indicate where the original has been modified for clarity: "I appreciate it [the honor], but I must refuse", and "the future of psionics [see definition]
8036-411: The same on the screen. (Most style guides now discourage double spaces, and some electronic writing tools, including Misplaced Pages's software, automatically collapse double spaces to single.) The full traditional set of typesetting tools became available with the advent of desktop publishing and more sophisticated word processors . Despite the widespread adoption of character sets like Unicode that support
8134-435: The same width as a numerical digit. (Many fonts have digits of equal width. ) It is used within numbers such as the phone number 555‒0199, especially in columns so as to maintain alignment. In contrast, the en dash – ( U+2013 – EN DASH ) is generally used for a range of values. The minus sign − ( U+2212 − MINUS SIGN ) glyph is generally set a little higher, so as to be level with
8232-462: The same word or phrase in the original language to avoid ambiguity. For example: He is trained in the way of the open hand [karate]. Style and usage guides originating in the news industry of the twentieth century , such as the AP Stylebook , recommend against the use of square brackets because "They cannot be transmitted over news wires ." However, this guidance has little relevance outside of
8330-519: The second instance, as one alternative is replacing the other, not adding to it). Parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in informal writing and stream of consciousness literature. Examples include the southern American author William Faulkner (see Absalom, Absalom! and the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury ) as well as poet E. E. Cummings . Parentheses have historically been used where
8428-425: The section of a dictionary entry which contains the etymology of the word the entry defines. Brackets (called move-left symbols or move right symbols ) are added to the sides of text in proofreading to indicate changes in indentation: Square brackets are used to denote parts of the text that need to be checked when preparing drafts prior to finalizing a document. Square brackets are used in some countries in
8526-554: The shape of the crescent moon ( Latin : luna ). Most typewriters only had the left and right parentheses. Square brackets appeared with some teleprinters. Braces (curly brackets) first became part of a character set with the 8-bit code of the IBM 7030 Stretch . In 1961, ASCII contained parentheses, square, and curly brackets, and also less-than and greater-than signs that could be used as angle brackets. In English, typographers mostly prefer not to set brackets in italics , even when
8624-401: The species Polyphylla alba while also mentioning that it is in the subgenus Xerasiobia . There is also a convention of citing a subgenus by enclosing it in parentheses after its genus, e.g., Polyphylla ( Xerasiobia ) is a way to refer to the subgenus Xerasiobia within the genus Polyphylla . Parentheses are similarly used to cite a subgenus with the name of a prokaryotic species, although
8722-523: The technological constraints of the industry and era. In linguistics, phonetic transcriptions are generally enclosed within square brackets, whereas phonemic transcriptions typically use paired slashes , according to International Phonetic Alphabet rules. Pipes (| |) are often used to indicate a morphophonemic rather than phonemic representation. Other conventions are double slashes (⫽ ⫽), double pipes (‖ ‖) and curly brackets ({ }). In lexicography , square brackets usually surround
8820-403: The time of pause A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause. At ev'ry comma, stop while one you count; At semicolon, two is the amount; A colon doth require the time of three ; The period four , as learned men agree. The use of punctuation was not standardised until after the invention of printing. According to the 1885 edition of The American Printer , the importance of punctuation
8918-412: The way in which they handle quotation marks, particularly in conjunction with other punctuation marks. In British English, punctuation marks such as full stops and commas are placed inside the quotation mark only if they are part of what is being quoted, and placed outside the closing quotation mark if part of the containing sentence. In American English, however, such punctuation is generally placed inside
9016-735: The widths of the lower-case letters. The three main uses of the en dash are: The en dash is commonly used to indicate a closed range of values – a range with clearly defined and finite upper and lower boundaries – roughly signifying what might otherwise be communicated by the word "through" in American English, or "to" in International English. This may include ranges such as those between dates, times, or numbers. Various style guides restrict this range indication style to only parenthetical or tabular matter, requiring "to" or "through" in running text. Preference for hyphen vs. en dash in ranges varies. For example,
9114-511: The words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet -based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization , no vowels (see abjad ), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes ) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs. By
9212-443: Was filed, and published in 1992 under World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) number WO9219458, for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma". The question comma has a comma instead of the dot at the bottom of a question mark, while the exclamation comma has a comma in place of the point at the bottom of an exclamation mark. These were intended for use as question and exclamation marks within
9310-523: Was not used in Chinese , Japanese , Korean and Vietnamese Chu Nom writing until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the late 19th and early 20th century. In unpunctuated texts, the grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context. Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they often look different and have different customary rules. In
9408-488: Was noted in various sayings by children, such as: Charles the First walked and talked Half an hour after his head was cut off . With a semicolon and a comma added, it reads as follows: Charles the First walked and talked; Half an hour after, his head was cut off. In a 19th-century manual of typography , Thomas MacKellar writes: Shortly after the invention of printing, the necessity of stops or pauses in sentences for
9506-478: Was preferred by authors such as James Joyce : The Walrus and the Carpenter Were walking close at hand; They wept like anything to see Such quantities of sand: "If this were only cleared away," They said, "it would be grand!" An em dash may be used to indicate omitted letters in a word redacted to an initial or single letter or to fillet a word, by leaving the start and end letters whilst replacing
9604-414: Was rhetorical, to aid reading aloud. As explained by writer and editor Lynne Truss , "The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required." Printed books, whose letters were uniform, could be read much more rapidly than manuscripts. Rapid reading, or reading aloud, did not allow time to analyze sentence structures. This increased speed led to
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