They can also indicate shorthand for " either singular or plural" for nouns, e.g. Parentheses may be used in formal writing to add supplementary information, such as "Senator John McCain ( R - Arizona) spoke at length". A dash before and after the material is also sometimes used. Ī comma before or after the material can also be used, though if the sentence contains commas for other purposes, visual confusion may result. Parentheses contain adjunctive material that serves to clarify (in the manner of a gloss) or is aside from the main point. In careful or formal writing, "parentheses" is also used in British English. They are also known as "parens" / p ə ˈ r ɛ n z/, "circle brackets", or "smooth brackets". ( and ) are parentheses / p ə ˈ r ɛ n θ ɪ s iː z/ (singular parenthesis / p ə ˈ r ɛ n θ ɪ s ɪ s/) in American English, and either round brackets or simply brackets in British English. Look up parenthesis or ( ) in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. However, in other languages like German, if brackets enclose text in italics, they are usually also set in italics. In English, typographers mostly prefer not to set brackets in italics, even when the enclosed text is italic. In 1961, ASCII contained parentheses, square, and curly brackets, and also less-than and greater-than signs that could be used as angle brackets. Square brackets appeared with some teleprinters.īraces (curly brackets) first became part of a character set with the 8-bit code of the IBM 7030 Stretch. Most typewriters only had the left and right parentheses. Erasmus coined the term lunula to refer to the round brackets or parentheses ( ) recalling the shape of the crescent moon ( Latin: luna). Various forms of brackets are used in mathematics, with specific mathematical meanings, often for denoting specific mathematical functions and subformulas.Īngle brackets or chevrons ⟨ ⟩ were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English. The number of opening brackets matches the number of closing brackets in such cases. In casual writing and in technical fields such as computing or linguistic analysis of grammar, brackets nest, with segments of bracketed material containing embedded within them other further bracketed sub-segments. īrackets are typically deployed in symmetric pairs, and an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'right' bracket or, alternatively, an "opening bracket" or "closing bracket", respectively, depending on the directionality of the context. Other minor bracket shapes exist, such as (for example) slash or diagonal brackets used by linguists to enclose phonemes. "Brackets", without further qualification, are in British English the (… ) marks and in American English the marks. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their names, that vary between British and American English. A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings.
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