British English used to use an interpunct / middle dot "·" as a decimal point, writing twenty-one pounds and forty-eight pence as £21·48.
Was this punctuation mark ever used in American English in a similar fashion? If so, when?
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It's not common. Lots of different characters are used in printed works (especially mathematical), but day-to-day communications has traditionally been limited by the QWERTY typewriter character set.– Hot LicksCommented Feb 11, 2018 at 21:07
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When and where was it used? In the press? In books?– LambieCommented Feb 11, 2018 at 21:40
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1@Hot Licks When I first learned about decimals, at the age of about 9, we were told by our teacher that the decimal point was placed half-way up the nearest figure. Adherence to this in exercises was rigidly enforced. When writing by hand, I still do it today. I'm trying to think if the first typewriter I ever used had a decimal point, separate from a full stop. The French, of course, use a comma.– WS2Commented Feb 11, 2018 at 22:25
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1I used to write them vertically centred too - I remember being inordinately pleased when I found I could type an · on my keyboard a few years back. It is how many of us were taught.– Will CrawfordCommented Feb 11, 2018 at 22:37
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1@WS2 - I have never seen this convention in the US, except in foreign texts. And I was exposed to typewriters from a young age, and have never seen one with this feature. Also, I've never seen features in computer fonts that would appear to relate to it. And searching the early computer codes (Baudot, Fieldata, ASCII) I don't see this character. (However, apparently the "mid dot" was added to Extended ASCII, as a mathematical symbol.)– Hot LicksCommented Feb 11, 2018 at 22:38
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2 Answers
In high school, I had one teacher who used it (and insisted that we use it) as a multiplication sign. I have since occasionally seen other people use it that way in mathematics. The reason is to avoid confusion between the multiplication sign × and the letter x. Since x is frequently used to represent an unknown value, there is actually some sense in this. Not a lot, though, since it can also be really difficult to distinguish · from a decimal.
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Interesting - I was taught (Be Eng, 60's and 70's) the opposite: middle dot for decimal point, full stop / period for multiplication. (The great thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from.)– peterGCommented Feb 21, 2018 at 22:13
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1Please identify your country/culture when writing about culture-specific stuff. Commented Feb 21, 2018 at 22:19
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@peterG You learnt to use a period as a multiplication sign? That’s definitely a first for me. I’ve heard of using interpuncts and x’es as (handwritten) multiplication signs, but never an actual period. Commented Feb 21, 2018 at 22:23
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Of course; sorry about that. I'm talking about the late 1980s in rural Nebraska.– spokoCommented Feb 21, 2018 at 22:24
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@JanusBahsJacquet Yes - your incredulity made me wonder, and it's been a long time, but I located a musty folder of college work at the back of a cupboard and confirmed it.– peterGCommented Feb 21, 2018 at 22:48
According to Wikipedia the interpunct is a typical British English usage which gradually decreased with the adoption of international standards.
In British typography, the space dot is an interpunct used as the formal decimal point. Its use is advocated by laws and by academic circles such as the Cambridge University History Faculty Style Guide and is mandated by some UK-based academic journals such as The Lancet.
When the British currency was decimalised in 1971, the official advice issued was to write decimal amounts with a raised point (for example, £21·48) and to use a decimal point "on the line" only when typesetting constraints made it unavoidable.
This usage, however, has been declining since the mid-1970s, as the importation of electronic typewriters, calculators and computers from the United States and Japan familiarised Britons with using full stops and made the space dot harder to typeset.The space dot may still be used frequently in handwriting, however.
As a decimal point:
In addition to representing syllables, interpuncts are also occasionally used as the decimal point in a number. This used to be especially common in British English particularly before the spread of modern word processors when a period (full stop) became much easier and quicker to type. It is now much less common to see an interpunct used in this way in everyday writing, even in British English, but it is not unheard of.
(The Free Dictionary)
answered Feb 11, 2018 at 23:24
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2So was it ever in use in American English? I'm not sure what your answer is.– JoeCommented Feb 11, 2018 at 23:27
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@Joe - it was a BrE thing. It usage is uncommon nowadays. Commented Feb 11, 2018 at 23:36
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2The Wikipedia page was linked to in the question as well. The fact that the interpunct was used in Britain but has become much more uncommon there, while the dot has always been the norm in the US, is not really questioned here—the question is whether the interpunct was used at all in the US, even as a less common variant. I don’t think this answer really answers that. Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 0:40
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@JanusBahsJacquet - I posted the text from Wikipedia because I think they clearly explain (together with the other source) that the usage was a BrE one. Whether the imterpunct was also casually used in America or anywhere else in not really much of an issue. There is no evidnce, as far as I can tell, that is was common usage, even to a lesser extent, in AmE. If anyone can prove it was, I’ll be happy to upvote that. Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 7:25