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A full stop or period, also called a full point, is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and several other languages. A period consists of a small dot placed at the end of a line of text, thus: "."
The term full stop is generally differentiated from that of period in contexts where both might be used by the fact that a full stop is specifically referential of a delimiting punctuation, while a period involves any appropriately sized and placed dot in English language text, to include indicating abbreviation, but excluding certain special uses of dots at the bottom of a line of text like ellipsis points.
Abbreviations
The period is also used after abbreviations, such as Mr., Dr., Mrs., Ms. If the abbreviation is ending a declaratory sentence a second period is not needed (e.g. My name is Phil Simpson M.D.) but in the case of an interogative or exclamatory sentence a question or exclamation mark is needed. (In the UK, abbreviations that end in the same letter as the word they are abbreviating are often no longer followed by a full stop. In the USA, the older usage is still always adhered to.)
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.
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 descriptivists 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 WYSIWYG editors.
Chinese full stop
In Chinese, the partition sign "．" (間隔號 jiāngéhào, Unicode: U+FF0E - FULLWIDTH FULL STOP) is used to separate the given name and the family name of Westerners, or unsinicized 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).
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
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