Following this convention, when more than three levels of nesting are needed, often a cycle of parentheses, square brackets, and curly brackets will continue. This is not commonly used in formal writing (though sometimes other brackets will be used for one or more inner set of parentheses [in other words, secondary Ī related convention is that when parentheses have two levels of nesting, curly brackets (braces) are the outermost pair. Parentheses may be nested (generally with one set (such as this) inside another set). Examples of this usage can be seen in editions of Fowler's. Parentheses have historically been used where the dash is currently used in alternatives, such as "parenthesis)(parentheses". Examples include the southern American author William Faulkner (see Absalom, Absalom! and the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury) as well as poet E. Parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in informal writing and stream of consciousness literature. "(s)he agreed with his/her physician" (the slash in the second instance, as one alternative is replacing the other, not adding to it). It can also be used for gender neutral language, especially in languages with grammatical gender, e.g. 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. ( and ) are called 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 "brackets" in the UK, India, Ireland, Canada, the West Indies, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia they are also known as "round brackets", "parens" / p ə ˈ r ɛ n z/, "circle brackets", or "smooth brackets". For the keyboard symbols, see List of emoticons. Parentheses or (round) brackets įor technical reasons, ":)" redirects here. 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 parenthesis, 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. Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus 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. There are also various less common symbols considered brackets. In British usage they are known as round brackets (or simply brackets), square brackets, curly brackets, and angle brackets in American usage they are respectively known as parentheses, brackets, braces, and chevrons. There are four primary types of brackets. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, 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. A bracket, as used in British English, 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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