middle dot

English

Noun

middle dot (plural middle dots)

1. (typography) Synonym of interpunct ⟨·⟩.
2. (grammar) Synonym of middle point ⟨⸳⟩.
   • 1930, Frank Moore Colby, Talcott Williams, The New International Encyclopaedia, volume 19, Dodd, Mead and Company, page 374:

     The Greek manuscripts of later date show a system more like that now employed. About the ninth century the comma appears to denote the slight pause, while the high dot (·) indicates a colon or semicolon, and the full stop is denoted by a larger dot or double dot and a space. A little later the interrogation point (;) appears, though not very frequently. The Latin grammarians adopted the punctuation by dots from the Greeks, but seemingly modified the system slightly so as to give the middle dot the middle value and the lower the smallest.

   • 1963, David Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law‎, Little, Brown and Company:

     At the end of a complete sentence (Latin periodus), the speaker paused to take on air, and that pause was sometimes indicated with a high dot ·. A speaker might also pause when he had covered a large portion of a sentence − a member; in Latin this was a colon, the same word used for the “great gut.” If such a pause were indicated at all in writing, it was as a dot on the line, as the period is now written. A shorter division of a periodus was a comma, and the pause to catch the breath after a comma was sometimes shown in writing by a middle dot ⸳.

   • 2002, Fernando Poyatos, Nonverbal Communication Across Disciplines‎, volume 3. Narrative literature, theater, cinema, translation, John Benjamins Publishing Company, page 127:

     Museum librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium is credited with the punctuation system used later by Greek grammarians in the Alexandrian schools, dividing discourse into sections by means of a pointing system of dots: middle dot [⸳] a the end of a brief clause (‘komma’) for the pause we mark with our comma; low dot on the line [.] for a long clause (‘kolon’), like our colon or semicolon; and high dot [·] to close a sentence (‘periodos’), like our full stop; distinctions not consistently used.

   • 2020, Karen Cheng, Designing Type, Yale University Press, page 198:

     Alcui (like Aristophanes) also advocated the use of a baseline dot (called the comma) to indicate a short pause; a middle dot (called the colon) for a medium pause; and a high dot (called the periodos) for the longest break.