Space (punctuation)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Punctuation |
|---|
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apostrophe ( ', ’ ) |
| Interword separation |
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spaces ( ) ( ) ( ) |
| General typography |
|
ampersand ( & ) |
| Uncommon typography |
|
asterism ( ⁂ ) |
In writing, a space is any empty (non-written) zone between written sections. The term however is usually used to refer to an empty zone used for interword separation (interword space).
Not all languages use spaces between words; the ancient Latin and Greek did not. Spaces were not used to separate words until roughly 600 AD – 800 AD (see interword separation for more on the history). Traditionally, all CJK languages have no space: modern Chinese and Japanese (except when written with little or no kanji) still do not, but modern Korean uses spaces.
For use of spaces after full stops (periods), exclamation marks, and question marks, see discussion in the article full stop.
[edit] See also
In typography there are various kinds of interword spaces, mainly differing in their width. Correspondingly, even more space characters exist in computing to combine the different widths with different word-breaking properties in dynamic rearrangement of text.
- typography
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- Hair space — the narrowest of metallic spaces in typesetting or the narrowest space used in typography (Unicode: U+200A)
- French spacing — name of the practice of putting more spaces in a text than English typographical convention calls for
- computing
