Full stop
[a] 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;[b] in American English, it is used in both cases.
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").
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.
[3][4] The full stop symbol derives from the Greek punctuation introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the 3rd century BCE in Alexandria.
[5] The name period is first attested (as the Latin loanword peridos) in Ælfric of Eynsham's Old English treatment on grammar.
There, it was distinguished from the full stop (the distinctio) and continued the Greek underdot's earlier function as a comma between phrases.
[6] In the 7th century, Isidore of Seville updated the system slightly; he assigned the dots to indicate short ., medium · and long · pauses in reading, respectively.
[9][1] The word period was used as a name for what printers often called the "full point", the punctuation mark that was a dot on the baseline and used in several situations.
However, according to the 2014 University of Oxford Style Guide, a full stop is not to be written if it is followed, or preceded, by an ellipsis.
In the case of an interrogative or exclamatory sentence ending with an abbreviation, a question or exclamation mark can still be added (e.g., "Are you Gabriel Gama Jr.?").
[29] As some examples from American style guides, The Chicago Manual of Style (primarily for book and academic-journal publishing) deprecates the use of full points in acronyms, including U.S.,[30] while The Associated Press Stylebook (primarily for journalism) dispenses with full points in acronyms except for certain two-letter cases, including U.S., U.K. and U.N., but not EU.
[31] In British English, whether for the 12-hour clock or sometimes its 24-hour counterpart, the dot is commonly used and some style guides recommend it when telling time, including those from non-BBC public broadcasters in the UK, the academic manual published by Oxford University Press under various titles,[32] as well as the internal house style book for the University of Oxford,[33] and that of The Economist,[34] The Guardian[35] and The Times newspapers.
Another common use in African-American Vernacular English is found in the phrase "And that's on period", which is used to express the strength of the speaker's previous statement, usually to emphasise an opinion.
India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan follow the Indian numbering system, which utilizes commas and decimals much like the aforementioned system popular in most English-speaking countries but separates values of one hundred thousand and above differently, into divisions of lakh and crore: In countries that use the comma as a decimal separator, the point is sometimes found as a multiplication sign; for example, 5,2 .
This applies mostly in Central and Northern Europe: in German, Hungarian, several Slavic languages (Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian), Faroese, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian and also in Basque and Turkish.
In older literature on mathematical logic, the period glyph was used to indicate how expressions should be bracketed, as explained in the Glossary of Principia Mathematica.
[39] In computing, the full point, usually called a dot in this context, is often used as a delimiter, such as in DNS lookups, Web addresses, file names and software release versions: It is used in many programming languages as an important part of the syntax.
The end of a sentence would be marked by STOP; its use "in telegraphic communications was greatly increased during the World War, when the Government employed it widely as a precaution against having messages garbled or misunderstood, as a result of the misplacement or emission [sic] of the tiny dot or period.
The practice in the United States and Canada is to place full stops and commas inside quotation marks in most styles.
For example, The Chicago Manual of Style recommends it for fields where comma placement could affect the meaning of the quoted material, such as linguistics and textual criticism.
The low dot was increasingly but irregularly used to mark full stops after the 9th century and was fully adapted after the advent of print.
In Sanskrit, the additional symbol of two vertical lines U+0965 ॥ DEVANAGARI DOUBLE DANDA is used to mark the end of a poetic verse.
In the Eastern Nagari script used to write languages like Bangla and Assamese, the same vertical line ("।") is used for a full stop, known as Daa`ri in Bengali.
Similarly, it also uses U+1C7F ᱿ OL CHIKI PUNCTUATION DOUBLE MUCAAD to indicate a major break, like the end of a section, although rarely used.
Latin full stops were later introduced into the Sinhalese script after the introduction of paper due to the influence of European languages.
Full stop Unicode code points: Researchers from Binghamton University performed a small study, published in 2016, on young adults and found that text messages that included sentences ended with full stops—as opposed to those with no terminal punctuation—were perceived as insincere, though they stipulated that their results apply only to this particular medium of communication: "Our sense was, is that because [text messages] were informal and had a chatty kind of feeling to them, that a period may have seemed stuffy, too formal, in that context," said head researcher Cecelia Klin.
[60] A 2016 story by Jeff Guo in The Washington Post stated that the line break had become the default method of punctuation in texting, comparable to the use of line breaks in poetry, and that a period at the end of a sentence causes the tone of the message to be perceived as cold, angry or passive-aggressive.
[61] According to Gretchen McCulloch, an internet linguist, using a full stop to end messages is seen as "rude" by more and more people.
