In writing, a space ( ) is a blank area that separates words, sentences, syllables (in syllabification) and other written or printed glyphs (characters).
[citation needed] Inter-word spaces ease the reader's task of identifying words, and avoid outright ambiguities such as "now here" vs. "nowhere".
[citation needed] Computer representation of text facilitates getting around mechanical and physical limitations such as character widths in at least two ways: Modern English uses a space to separate words, but not all languages follow this practice.
[1] The earliest Greek script also used interpuncts to divide words rather than spacing, although this practice was soon displaced by the scriptio continua.
Modern Korean, however, has spaces as an essential part of its writing system (because of Western influence), given the phonetic nature of the hangul script that requires word dividers to avoid ambiguity, as opposed to Chinese characters which are mostly very distinguishable from each other.
Unicode defines many variants of a single whitespace character, with various properties; the more commonly encountered variations include: In URLs, spaces are percent encoded with its ASCII/UTF-8 representation %20.