Scriptio continua
style of writing without spaces between words / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Scriptio continua (Latin for "continuous script") is a style of writing that does not use spaces, different letter cases, or punctuation to tell apart words, phrases, or sentences. It was a common way of writing for texts in Ancient Greek and Classical Latin.
Although spoken Greek and Latin did use punctuation to tell words apart, scriptio continua was used to save space and ink.[source?]
Use of scriptio continua became less common after the fall of the Roman Empire, and spaces began to appear between words. The first known documents that used spacing were Irish and Anglo-Saxon Bibles and Gospels.[1] However, scriptio continua is still used for the writing systems for several modern languages, including Southeast Asian abugidas like Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese, Javanese, Balinese, and Tibetan. Languages that use the Chinese character system like Chinese and Japanese sometimes use scriptio continua, even though modern Chinese and Japanese stopped using it when they adopted punctuation during the 19th and 20th centuries.