2 Decimal point

The same glyph is very often used, rather than a mid-line point, as a decimal point (or dot) in English-speaking countries. For example:

3.14159

For more on this use see Decimal separator.

3 Spacing after full stop

In typewritten texts and other documents printed in uniform-width fonts, two spaces are generally placed after the full stop, as opposed to one space as after most other punctuation symbols. (Period is an older name than full stop, now used primarily in North America; in other English-speaking countries the newer usage has largely replaced the older.) In modern English language typographical usage, some debate has arisen around the proper number of trailing spaces after a full stop to separate sentences within a paragraph. Whereas two spaces are still regarded generally by experts to be the more proper usage for monospace typefaces, the inability of most keyboards and word processing software to correctly represent the 1.5 spaces that had previously become standard for typographically proportional (non-monospace) fonts has led to some confusion about how to space between sentences while using word processing tools. Academic usage descriptivist s tend to support the notion that a single space after a full stop should be considered standard because of the growing common usage by non-experts. Prescriptivists, meanwhile, adhere to the earlier, and in many ways more practically useful, two space distinction of full stop spacing from spacing within a sentence. With the advent of standardized HTML for rendering webpages, however, the broader distinction between full stop spacing and internal spacing in a sentence has become largely moot on the World Wide Web. Standardized HTML treats additional whitespace after the first space as immaterial, and ignores it when rendering the page. A common workaround for this is the use of   to represent extra spaces, and is done automatically by WYSIWYGWYSIWYG (pronounced "wizzy-wig") is an acronym for W hat Y ou S ee I s W hat Y ou G et, and is used in computing to refer to the technology that makes sure the image seen on the screen corresponds to what is printed out on paper. Today this is expected fo editors.

4 Chinese full stop

In ChineseThe Chinese language (/, /, or ; pinyin: hany, huay, or zhongwen) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although most Chinese view the many varieties of spoken Chinese as a single language, regional variations in spoken language are compara, the partition sign "．" (間隔號 jiāngéhào, Unicode: U+FF0E - FULLWIDTH FULL STOP) is used to separate the given nameA given name specifies and differentiates between members of a group of individuals, especially a family, all of whose members usually share the same family name. The given name may be single, or several names may be given (the latter are known as middle and the family nameA family name or surname is that part of a person's name that indicates to what family he or she belongs. In English one's family name is generally written after given names hence one's family name is often called a last name The word "surname" is " name" of Westerners, or un sinicized or desinicized minority Chinese ethnic peoples, for example, 威廉．莎士比亞 (Weilian．Shashibiya) is the transliteration of " William Shakespeare", and the partition sign is inserted in between the characters of "William" and those of "Shakespeare". The Chinese language, like many others, do not use space or punctuation to define word boundaries when writing native words. The Chinese partition sign is also used to separate book title and chapter title when they are mentioned consecutively (with book title first, then chapter).

5 Computing use

In computing, it is often used as a delimiter, also called "dot", for example in DNS lookups and file names. For example:

www.wikipedia.org

In computer programming, the full stop corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 46, or 0x2E.

See dot for other dots or periods

Typography Punctuation

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