Full stop

[koster]

What's the origin of 'full stop'?

I mean, was there a normal stop or a half stop?

I know in telegrams the end of a sentence was 'stop' and the end of the telgram was 'full stop', but that's a different usage, and people must have been talking about full stops long before telegrams came along.

[Robert G]

A quick search via Google doesn't bring up the answer, although maybe it's buried in there somewhere. It's an interesting question and makes one wonder how all the punctuation marks came into being, and when. Someone must know! How about Lynn Truss? (I never read her book).

Logically the term seems unnecessary. What is wrong with the plain 'stop'? A stop is a stop, isn't it? A thing has either stopped or it has not stopped. There is no part stop.

Perhaps, even before telegrams, there were stops and full stops, and no such thing as a commas. Then when the comma was invented, presumably to replace the stop, it would have been logical, to my mind, to replace the term 'full stop' with 'stop'.

I shall watch this topic with interest.

[kempie]

The full stop is also known as the period and the full point.
It is used to signify the completion of a sentence where other 'lesser' points may form breaks within a sentence. These breaks can be ranked in increasing 'power' thus

Comma - marks the end of a clause

Semicolon - marks off a series of clauses (or possibly sentences) of co-ordinate value, or separates sentences the latter of which limits the former

Colon - separates clauses which are grammatically independent and discontinuous, but between which there is an apposition or similar relation of sense

Full stop.

[Quizmonster]

The earliest recorded use of the phrase 'full stop', meaning the mark at the end of a sentence, appears in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice from the 1590s. The use of 'stop' in telegrams was just an abbreviation of that...after all, the whole point of a telegram was its brevity.

[sophie_1003]

yes but when did people first start writing . or , to indicate pauses? And why is the larger one (a comma) only a short pause whereas the smaller one (a full stop) is a indication of the end of a sentence etc? Also, what about question marks and exclamation marks?

[THECORBYLOON]

The Latin word "quaesto" meaning question was abbreviated to qo at the end of a question and was written with the q above the o (if you write it down it'll make more sense) Over time, this became the symbol we have to-day.

The exclamation mark has a similar history. The Latin word for joy is " Io" and that too was written at the end of a statement which in turn became "!"

[Quizmonster]

Greek scholars in Egypt started punctuation at the time of Ptolemy, in the 4th century BC. They recognised sentences (called 'periodos')...limbs (called 'cola')... and less important word-groups (called 'commata'). You can already see there the �bones' of three of the words we now use in punctuation...the period, the colon and the comma.
When the first books in English were being printed by Caxton, there was hardly any punctuation in them and certainly nothing that could be called a punctuation 'system'. However, by Shakespeare's time - only about a century later - pretty-well all the punctuation we are familiar with now was already in existence.