Because araea is a full-width letter, it looks better than middle dot between Hangul. In addition, it is drawn like the middle dot in Windows default Korean fonts such as Batang.
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However, depending on the writing tradition, the middle dot may appear after the syllable it modifies (which is found in the Western style) or before the syllable it modifies (which is found in the Northern and Eastern styles). In Unicode, the middle dot is encoded both as independent glyph or as part of a pre-composed letter, such as in . In the Carrier syllabics subset, the middle dot Final indicates a glottal stop, but a centered dot diacritic on -position letters transform the vowel value to , for example: , .
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In Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Taiwanese Hokkien, middle dot is often used as a workaround for dot above right diacritic because most early encoding systems did not support this diacritic. This is now encoded as . Unicode did not support this diacritic until June 2004. Newer fonts often support it natively; however, the practice of using middle dot still exists.
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In chemistry, the middle dot is used to separate the parts of formulas of addition compounds, mixture salts or solvates (mostly hydrates), such as of copper(II) sulphate pentahydrate, .
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678,90123 in Ido. The 1931 grammar of Volapük by Arie de Jong uses the comma as its decimal separator, and—somewhat unusually—uses the middle dot as the thousands separator (12·345·678,90123).Gramat Volapüka.
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Japanese is written without spaces between words, and, to aid understanding, foreign phrases and names are sometimes transliterated with an interpunct separating the words, called a ; for example, (Bill Gates). When it is assumed that the reader knows the separate gairaigo words in the phrase, the middle dot is omitted, especially for wasei eigo. For example, the phrase konpyūtā gēmu ("computer game") contains two well-known gairaigo, and therefore is not written with a middle dot; the same principle is applied for panti sutokkingu ("pantyhose", lit. "panty stocking"), Japanese coinage.
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The Latin-1 Punctuation and Symbols subheading contains 32 characters of common international punctuation characters, such as inverted exclamation and question marks, and a middle dot; and symbols like currency signs, spacing diacritic marks, vulgar fraction, and superscript numbers.
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Interpuncts are used in written Korean to denote a list of two or more words, more or less in the same way a slash (/) is used to juxtapose words in many other languages. In this role it also functions in a similar way to the English en dash, as in , "American–Soviet relations". The use of interpuncts has declined in years of digital typography and especially in place of slashes, but, in the strictest sense, a slash cannot replace a middle dot in Korean typography. () is used more than a middle dot when an interpunct is to be used in Korean typography, though araea is technically not a punctuation symbol but actually an obsolete Hangul jamo.
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A middot may be used as a consonant or modifier letter, rather than as punctuation, in transcription systems and in language orthographies. For such uses Unicode provides the code point .Some discussion of the inappropriateness of a punctuation mark for such use, as well as the near equivalence of the triangular half colon, can be found here: Bibiko, Hans-Jörg (2010-04-07), On the proposed U+A78F LATIN LETTER MIDDLE DOT Hill, Nathan (2010-04-14), Latin letter middle dot In the Sinological tradition of the 36 initials, the onset 影 (typically reconstructed as a glottal stop) may be transliterated with a middot , and the onset 喩 (typically reconstructed as a null onset) with an apostrophe . Conventions vary, however, and it is common for 影 to be transliterated with the apostrophe.
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The teleia should also be distinguished from the _ano_ teleia mark, which is named "high stop" but looks like an interpunct (a middle dot) and principally functions as the Greek semicolon. The Armenian script uses the ։ (, ). It looks similar to the colon (:). In Simplified Chinese and Japanese, a small circle is used instead of a solid dot: "。" (U+3002 "Ideographic Full Stop").
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The script consists of 52 characters, all of which can also represent numerals from 1 to 700,000 when a combining mark is added above, below, or both above and below them, described as similar to Coptic. 49 of the characters are found in the Sinai palimpsests. Several punctuation marks are also present, including a middle dot, a separating colon, an apostrophe, paragraph marks, and citation marks.
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From Americanist notation, it has been adopted into the orthographies of several languages, such as Washo. In the writings of Franz Boas, the middot was used for palatal or palatalized consonants, e.g. for IPA [c]. In the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, a middle dot ⟨ᐧ⟩ indicates a syllable medial ⟨w⟩ in Cree and Ojibwe, ⟨y⟩ or ⟨yu⟩ in some of the Athapascan languages, and a syllable medial ⟨s⟩ in Blackfoot.
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Hyphens are occasionally used to denote syllabification, as in syl-la-bi-fi-ca-tion. Various British and North American dictionaries use an interpunct, sometimes called a "middle dot" or "hyphenation point", for this purpose, as in syl·la·bi·fi·ca·tion. This allows the hyphen to be reserved only for places where a hard hyphen is intended (for example, ', ', '). Similarly, hyphens may be used to indicate a word is being or should be spelled.
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In SI units, the multiplication dot (dot operator) or space (often typographically a non-breaking space) is used as a multiplication sign. Only a comma or full stop (period) may be used as a decimal marker. In mathematics, a small middle dot can be used to represent product; for example, for the product of x and y. When dealing with scalars, it is interchangeable with the multiplication sign, such that means the same thing as .
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The full stop symbol derives from the Greek punctuation introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the 3rd century . In his system, there were a series of dots whose placement determined their meaning. The full stop at the end of a completed thought or expression was marked by a high dot ⟨˙⟩, called the stigmḕ teleía () or "terminal dot". The "middle dot" ⟨·⟩, the stigmḕ mésē (), marked a division in a thought occasioning a longer breath (essentially a semicolon), while the low dot ⟨.
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In order to not confuse with a geminated , Catalan uses an with a middle dot ( in Catalan or interpunct) in the digraph , for example (excellent). The first character in the digraph, and , is included in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block at U+013F (uppercase) and U+140 (lowercase) respectively. In Catalan typography, is intended to fill two spaces, not three, so the interpunct is placed in the narrow space between the two s: and . However, it is common to write and , occupying three spaces.
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An interpunct, , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot and centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in ancient Latin script. (Word-separating spaces did not appear until some time between 600 and 800CE). It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages and is present in Unicode as code point . The multiplication dot (also known as the dot operator; ), which is frequently used in mathematical and scientific notation, has an appearance similar to the interpunct, but its exact shape and spacing may differ.
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Prior to June 2004, the vowel akin to but more open than ⟨o⟩, written with a 'dot above right', was not encoded. The usual workaround was to use the (stand-alone; spacing) character ‘middle dot’ (U+00B7, ⟨·⟩) or less commonly the combining character 'dot above' (U+0307). As these are far from ideal, since 1997 proposals have been submitted to the ISO/IEC working group in charge of ISO/IEC 10646 - namely, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 - to encode a new combining character 'dot above right'. This is now officially assigned to U+0358 (see documents N1593, N2507, N2628, N2699, and N2770).
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However, no distinction is kept for the Armenian (mirrored) parenthesis, so the standard ASCII/Unicode punctuation must be used according to their usual rendering. The left half-ring mark (modifier letter) is encoded here, and some other marks are unified with other scripts (notably the quotation marks, middle dot and dashes). Note that the characters encoded at code points U+055A and U+058A (Armenian apostrophe and hyphen, like in the charts for ArmsCII and ISO 10585), and as well as U+0559 (the modifier mark for numeric, added specifically into ISO 10646-1 and Unicode), may not be visible with all fonts supporting Armenian.
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Any such symbol can be called a decimal mark, decimal marker or decimal sign. Symbol-specific names are also used; decimal point and decimal comma refer to an (either baseline or middle) dot and comma respectively, when it is used as a decimal separator; these are the usual terms used in English, with the aforementioned generic terms reserved for abstract usage. In many contexts, when a number is spoken, the function of the separator is assumed by the spoken name of the symbol: comma or point in most cases. In some specialized contexts, the word decimal is instead used for this purpose (such as in International Civil Aviation Organization-regulated air traffic control communications).
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In situations where the interpunct is used as a decimal point, the multiplication sign used is usually a full stop (period), not an interpunct. In computing, the middle dot is usually displayed (but not printed) to indicate white space in various software applications such as word processing, graphic design, web layout, desktop publishing or software development programs. In some word processors, interpuncts are used to denote not only hard space or space characters, but also sometimes used to indicate a space when put in paragraph format to show indentations and spaces. This allows the user to see where white space is located in the document and what sizes of white space are used, since normally white space is invisible so tabs, spaces, non-breaking spaces and such are indistinguishable from one another.
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