Talk:Bracket

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Contents 1 Terminology 2 Crotchets? 3 Unicode angle brackets 4 Crystallography 5 Vinculum 6 Unicode 7 Angle brackets 8 Parentheses and appositives 9 Computer languages 10 Brackets in SM nicknames 11 American & Canadian English 12 Parentheses with Numbers 13 Emoticons Redirect 14 British English 15 Usage in chat 16 Allowing for a possible change in the number of subjects from singular to plural. 17 Still a Stub? 18 Silly Question

[edit] Terminology

Dear LC, This article is mainly about punctuation in English text.

Outside the programming context, "curly braces", or even "braces", is much more common than "curly brackets", but I do think the distinction is useful in programming contexts. I have attempted to deal with the diffrerences in usage in the associated article. I was concerned that readers accustomed to calling them "braces" would be confused by "brackets".

"Brackets" is basically a little-used synonym for "braces", and is given as such deep in the definitions in both the Webster's Unabridged and the Webster's Collegiate. The Random House Unabridged gives "brace" as a synonym for "bracket" only in the architectural sense. The OED does not give "bracket" as a synonym for "brace", nor do three college English handbooks I have lying around. My ancient Roget's Thesaurus includes both in a category called Vinculum, but since "hyphen" and "ox-yoke" are also in there, that isn't really data. The more modern Random House Word Menu carefully distinguishes "brackets" from "braces". Of course, none of these sources is particularly sophisticated about computer usage.

It is certainly true that the "class of brackets" includes braces, as both this article and the punctuation article clearly state, but the class also includes parentheses, and even though I turned up a reference in the Oxford English Dictionary to "curved brackets", again, hardly anyone actually calls parentheses "curved brackets".

See the Talk page under Punctuation for the sharply contrasted etymologies of "braces" and "bracket".Ortolan88

I'm likely wrong on this, but it's been my understanding that "brackets" in reference to the family of symbols is British English, and that in the US there's a distinction made between "parentheses" () "brackets" [] and "braces" {}. As far as I know, most Americans would never refer to parentheses as "brackets." 161.11.130.249 17:30, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

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Ortolan88, I saw your etymology, and thought it was great. :-) My intent wasn't to emphasize one term over another. I just wanted to fix two mistakes.

One mistake was that the Punctuation page claimed the symbols were given with their Unicode preferred names, where appropriate, but then it didn't give the Unicode preferred name. So I fixed the name to match the claim. It would have been just as good to fix the claim instead. I was just trying to fix the contradiction.

The other mistake is the use of the redundant phrase curly brace. The standard terms are curly bracket (to distinguish from other types of brackets) and brace (of which there is only one type, so no need to distinguish). According to the dictionary used by the Associated Press, there is a brace but not a curly brace. The same is true in the Random House Websters Dictionary. And the same in the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary. And the same in the American Heritage Dictionary. And the same in the Unicode standard index (the one that lists multiple names for each symbol). I see from Google th at some people use the redundant term curly brace, but since it isn't in the standard references to which I have access, it appears to be slang rather than a standard term. I could have replaced the redundant curly brace with either curly bracket or brace, but I used both so I wouldn't offend anyone. Apparently unsuccessfully.  :-) --LC

I'm not offended. I've called them curly braces for 40 years, but what the heck? Braces is definitely more elegant. Funny that I gathered all that information without noticing my own term was out of line with the dictionaries! I think I'll stick with curly braces in my own life, but what you've done for the 'pedia is fine. Ortolan88

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If brace and bracket don't actually share an etymology, the article really shouldn't say this:

Presumably due to the similarity of the words brace and bracket (they share an etymology), many people casually treat brace as a synonym for bracket.

Falcotron 07:08, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

I didn't want to change this without verifying that Ortolan88 was right. I found a variety of references that support the contrasting etymologies (e.g., http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bracket and http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=brace), and none that disagree. (If these words are related at all, it's via an as-yet-unattested PIE word for both arms and legs.) So, I changed this to be correct (s/they share an etymology/although they do not share an etymology/). Falcotron 22:16, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Crotchets?

I'd like to see a source for the claim Square brackets are called crochets in Great Britain.

I've lived mostly in Great Britain for 32 years, and I've never heard them called anything but "square brackets"

I put that in a couple of years ago and I just took it out. Turns out I had misread a definition. Crochet is an obsolete term for bracket, but only for the architectural bracket, not the typographical bracket. Sorry about that. Ortolan88 03:22, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Unicode angle brackets

0x2329 and 0x232A are "LEFT-" and "RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET". 0x3008-300B are "LEFT" and "RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET", and the corresponding thing with double, in the "CJK Symbols and Punctuation" Unicode block. There's also the "presentation form for vertical" versions (which include the other kinds of brackets, among other things), which are in the "CJK Compatibility Forms" Unicode block.

They are, I think, used to enclose names of things in Chinese (but I'd have no idea, since I can't actually read Chinese). I'm not sure what the "lenticular brackets" are for, either. They're also unsuitable for normal brackets, since they're very wide.

I'm just surprised that I don't have a font with angle brackets (OS X has many unicode symbols, anyway). --Elektron 05:29, 2004 Jun 14 (UTC)

U+3008–U+300B, according to the Unicode standard, are unambiguously wide. So, they're probably just "fullwidth form" variants of the more familiar angle brackets, for use in text consisting mostly of ideographs. The standard doesn't mention the lenticular brackets at all, outside of the code charts. They, and the wide angle brackets, are probably included in Unicode for compatibility with earlier asian character sets. - — G↭a⇅a | Talk 05:07, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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Ancient Chinese, I'm told, didn't have : or ! or , or ? (that was borrowed). Lenticular brackets are used in (Hong Kong) Chinese newspapers, when I checked a couple days ago, so it definitely has nothing to do with earlier character sets. There's probably some CJK reference somewhere that says what it means. --Elektron 07:36, 2004 Jun 18 (UTC)

I'd like to know why the Unicode Angle Brakets appear in grey color in the article.

Possibly because of bad browser/OS support. They don't appear at all on OSX (they're replaced by some funny character, which upon enlarging is a square with a funny arrow in it, and "MISC. 2300 23FF TECHNICAL" written on it, hm). Elektron 19:36, 2004 Aug 30 (UTC)

[edit] Crystallography

Crystallography uses these things to denote whether a plane or direction is being discussed, and whether it's generic or specific. I have put up a basic account of their use in Crystallography#Notation, but you may want to wait a few days for it to stabilize before you copy it into this article. This may also convince someone to finally flesh out Miller index.--Joel 06:14, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

I've noticed brackets used in legal writing and legal transcripts. What is their purpose in the context?

[edit] Vinculum

I'm removing vinculum from the main part of the article, because, well, it is a single object that does not bracket text. It does not require the sort of pairing that brackets do. It just happens to "bracket" expressions or groups of symbols in mathematical usage. A google search for "bar-bracket vinculum" yeilds few results, most wikipedia clones. I've made a note of the vinculum later in Bracket#In mathematics  —siroχo 05:26, September 7, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Unicode

The "angle brackets" in the article appear to be the CJK ones which are fullwidth. I tried changing them to the angle brackets in the "misc technical" code block but they were changed back by the software, so presumably they are the NC form? Anyway, the fullwidth ones look silly in the article :/ porges 05:07, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Angle brackets

The current article looks good, but I think the current symbols used for angle brackets should be changed to simple < and > . My computer just shows them as blank squares. It doesn't recognize the code used. The computer I'm using is quite common, thus a probable majority of people trying to read this article will just see blank squares instead of < and > . I'm tentatively going to change them.--Firsfron 17:09, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

The symbol you added is <. That's a greater- or lesser-than sign. An angle bracket is 〈.--Primetime 17:44, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

... which show up as blank squares on my computer, and many others. Wikipedia can't really illustrate an angle bracket when many (most?) people won't be able to see it.--Firsfron 01:46, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

With my browser, it doesn't show up in the table of contents. But when one scrolls down, it displays. Is it the same with you? You are correct that this is a problem with Internet Explorer. Other browsers do not have the same problem, but using the {{unicode|symbol goes here}} template causes most symbols to display in IE outside the TOC. Best wishes, Primetime 15:07, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm running Firefox on my Mac (OS X) and all I see are question marks for the angled brackets.. Scktwrnch 14:56, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be possible to make the letters that don't show everywhere link to an image? That way everyone could see which letter was meant (with some inconvenience though). I'm against replacing them with images, what do we have unicode for? 128.208.3.75 03:57, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

I removed the sentence "In some (slightly older) Spanish books, double chevrons may enclose speech." because I am convinced the author of that sencence meant guillemets. If not I request a citation. 128.208.3.75 04:07, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Parentheses and appositives

I removed this:

For example, "George Washington (a rich slaver) was not the wooden figure with wooden teeth that many think him". Indeed, such an interjection is called a parenthesis, and may also be set off with dashes or commas.

Because I've never seen a style guide make a claim that an appositive phrase would be set off by parentheses. I'll try work back in the use of parenthesis. SchmuckyTheCat 23:30, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Computer languages

The discussion on use of brackets in computer languages would be highly misleading to someone who didn't already know about the subject. It should be either (a) more complete, or (b) more obviously nothing more than a random survey of examples. Wording like "... are used to..." makes it sound like these are universal, and especially common, uses of brackets.

In the case of function arguments, this is true. But using parens to bound lists is pretty much restricted to the Lisp family, while many other languages use brackets for the same purpose (and braces for associative arrays). Square brackets are no more ubiquitous in regexps than parens or braces (and similarly for shell patterns). Brackets may not be as common as braces for blocks (the Smalltalk family vs. the C family), but they're not negligible.

And the most common use of parentheses in computer languages is completely ignored--grouping subexpressions: "(2 + 3) * 4", "ASSERT((foo<bar, baz>(qux)))", "(1, 2), 3", the parens around test expressions in C control statements, etc.

Also, some languages use other symbols essentially as brackets, with the same character serving as "left" and "right" (see "| i |" in Smalltalk, similar to "|2|" in math).

And it's a little strange to not even mention how braces are used in CSS, and then use CSS braces as an example a few lines later.

Finally, it's strange that a handful of these uses appear in the general discussion above. For example, under "Types of brackets": "In computer programming, curly brackets sometimes denote the beginning and ending of a sequence of statements or define a scope." Falcotron 07:03, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Brackets in SM nicknames

In the internet age, brackets [ ] and { } are used in nicknames by SM people to show so-called "ownership". I am tempted to add something about it at the end of the article, but SM is always a controversial thing (and surprising in an article of this kind, I suppose), and I am no expert on this, so I am still hesitant to mention it. Would it be appropriate to mention this use of brackets in the article, along with their use in mathematics, sport and law? --Blue Elf 23:08, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

If it's actually a widespread practice (and the different kinds of brackets have different well-understood meanings), I don't think it is inappropriate as such. However, as with internet culture in general, I would be wary of "canonicalizing" a convention that may only be in use in a few BDSM forums/chatrooms and not in others, however much the particpants that use it may consider it standard. I therefore think we should insist on explicit sourcing for such information. Henning Makholm 14:53, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] American & Canadian English

I speculate that in the United States, the unqualified word "brackets" normally refers to [] and "parentheses" refers t (), but in other countries, "brackets" means (). This article talks nothing about this. Anything to add?? Georgia guy 00:03, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

The article does talk about this. Look at the anonymous addition to the Parentheses section on 14 July.

This seems to be a strange place to put it, which may be why you missed it. If this is going to be useful, it should be rewritten and moved. Possibly it belongs up top, maybe in a second paragraph before the table of contents, saying that in addition to referring to the class of all these various kinds of brackets, the word "bracket" can also mean specifically parentheses (for Americans) or square brackets (for Brits). Readers probably won't find it buried in the parentheses section, and I can't think of anywhere else it makes sense.

But I'm not sure this belongs in the article in the first place. If you read through the talk page, there's already been some discussion about American vs. British usage (and Canadian?), and I suspect that the reason nobody added anything to the article (until the anonymous edit a few days ago) is that nobody could agree on what actually is typical British usage. Also, this is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary, and I'm not sure usage information for the word "bracket" is of central importance to an article on the class of brackets. Maybe it belongs on the bracket (disambiguation) page? Falcotron 05:18, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

OK, I made both of the changes I suggested. Again, I'm not sure whether we need this information in either the disambiguation page or the main page. But at least hopefully people will be able to find it now. Falcotron 05:44, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

And, if we're going to say parentheses are "sometimes known as... just brackets" maybe we should also say the same about square brackets (typical American usage) and braces (archaic usage in both countries, I believe?). Falcotron 05:47, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Parentheses with Numbers

Does anybody know why some people enclose a digit in parentheses after spelling the word out? e.g. There were five (5) ducks in the pond.

I know when I write up legal type documents I tend to do that to make absolutely certain there is no confusion or possibility of confusion. In proper English I was taught to only write out numbers under 100 and that was that needed to be done. For every day things it seems to be redundant. Scktwrnch 15:00, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

It's probably for those who don't know a lot of English. 67.188.172.165 05:35, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Emoticons Redirect

I've reworded the message at the beginning as it sounded a bit awkward. It said: "For technical reasons, some emoticons redirect here, such as :), :(, etc. because : is an unsupported character. :P takes you to P."

I've changed it to "For technical reasons, some emoticons redirect here. Ones such as :) & :( will because : is an unsupported character."

I removed the last part because it just isn't needed. I think the general idea is conveyed in the explanation. --Son0rouS 11:25, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] British English

I concur with the author who wrote that in other countries the signs ( ) is called brackets. I was educated in British schools and we called ( ) brackets.

[edit] Usage in chat

On chatrooms and message boards, actions are put in brackets.

"I know she can't sing, but I like Lindsay Lohan {ducks from flying vegetables}."

There's also the "Insert Item" usage.

"I don't care if [insert nominee here] deserves to be in the hall of fame, I think that Maris should be in."

[edit] Allowing for a possible change in the number of subjects from singular to plural.

I could find no written rule that applies to whether one should use a space before the opening parenthesis in this case. For example, "If you fail to comply with this requirement, this policy shall apply in the same manner it would have applied had such policy(ies) been so maintained in force." It is my understanding that a space is not used. The Elements of Style does not address this usage however; in the index there are several possibly plural terms listed omitting the space. For example, "adjective(s)", "modifier(s)", "verb(s)", etc.

Kaos Klerik 19:39, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

In such cases, you can consider rewording the phrase. "...had such policy or policies been so maintained..." would sound more natural. Xiner (talk, email) 17:56, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Still a Stub?

Why is this article listed as a "Stub"? It seems well beyond that to me. What else would it need to upgrade? Colincbn 16:59, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

It isn't. The "history" section is tagged as being a stub, which does not seem inappropriate given its extreme brevity. –Henning Makholm 19:22, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I see. My mistake. Thanks for the reply. Colincbn 05:25, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Silly Question

This might already be answered but I couldn't seem to find it in the main body of the article. What do you call the individual brackets or parenthesis? Is it "left" and "right" or "open" and "close" or something else entirely? Thanks, Colincbn 16:52, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

"A bracket" or "a parenthesis". (It is "parentheses" in plural). A "parenthesis" may also refer to the entire parenthesized expression, including bracket glyps and the content between them, or to the content alone. There seems to be no universally understood short way of overcoming this ambiguity in English, except for disambiguating explicitly (e.g. "opening parenthesis character") where one fears misunderstanding. –Henning Makholm 19:26, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I was wondering because of a separate article on ASCII art that needs to specify which of the two types are used while making pictures and emotions and things of that nature. Colincbn 05:21, 26 March 2007 (UTC)