In typography, a bullet ( • ) is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list. For example:
It is likely that the name originated from the resemblance of the traditional circular bullet symbol (•) to an actual bullet.
The bullet symbol may take any of a variety of shapes, such as circular, square, diamond, arrow, etc., and typical word processor software offer a wide selection of shapes and colours. Several regular symbols are conventionally used in ASCII-only text or another environments where bullet characters are not available, such as * (asterisk), - (hyphen), . (period), and even o (lowercase O). Of course, when writing by hand, bullets may be drawn in any style.
Bullets are most often used in technical writing, reference works, notes and presentations.
Example:
Where are bullets most often used?
An alternative method is to use a numbered list.
Bulleted items – known as "bullet points" – may be short phrases, single sentences, or of paragraph length. Bulleted items are not usually terminated with a full stop if they are not complete sentences, although it is a common practice to terminate every item except the last one with a semicolon, and terminate the last item with a full stop. It is correct to terminate a bullet point with a full stop if the text within that item consists of one 'full' sentence or more.