- published: 20 Apr 2015
- views: 22
An interpunct ( · ), also called an interpoint, is a punctuation mark consisting of a dot used for interword separation in ancient Latin script and in some modern languages as a stand-alone sign inside a word. It is present in Unicode as code point U+00B7 · middle dot (HTML: ·
·
).
The dot is vertically centered, e.g. "DONA·EIS·REQVIEM", and is therefore also called a middle dot or centered dot (Commonwealth: centred dot). In addition to the round dot form, inscriptions sometimes use a small equilateral triangle for the interpunct, pointing either up or down. Such triangles can be found on inscriptions on buildings in the twentieth century. Ancient Greek, by contrast, had not developed interpuncts; all the letters ran together. The use of spaces for word separation did not appear until much later, some time between 600 and 800 AD.
The dot operator (also called middle dot and visually similar or identical to the interpunct) is a multiplication sign (instead of the × used in English-speaking countries): “a multiplied by b” is written either explicitly as a·b or implicitly as ab, depending on context. It also discriminates the scalar product (a·b) from the vector cross product (a×b or a∧b) in vector multiplication.