Bullet (typography)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Punctuation |
|---|
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apostrophe ( ', ’ ) |
| Interword separation |
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spaces ( ) ( ) ( ) |
| General typography |
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ampersand ( & ) |
| Uncommon typography |
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asterism ( ⁂ ) |
In typography, a bullet is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list, like below, also known as the point of a bullet:
- This is the text of a list item. Notice the bullet to the left.
- This is a different list item, and so there is another bullet.
This line is part of the second list item; there is no bullet.
Bullets are most often used in technical writing or reference works to introduce a series of related items. They may be short phrases or of paragraph length. The main point is that all need to be tied together under a general heading. Bulleted items, commonly called "bullets", are not usually terminated with a full stop, even though the bullet points in the text above directly conflict with this statement, although it is also a common practice (for example, in Portugal) to terminate every item except the last one with a semicolon. It is correct to terminate a bullet point with a full stop under circumstances where more than one sentence makes up the contents of the bullet point.
The bullet corresponds to Unicode character 0x2022. In HTML, the codes • and • give • and •, respectively, but semantics requires that bulleted items be achieved with the appropriate use of the <li> tag inside an unordered list (<ul>). Unicode also defines a triangular bullet ‣ (U+2023).
It is likely that the name 'bullet point' originated from the resemblance of the mark to a bullet.
Bullets are not limited in shape to a black dot, as displayed above. A typical word processor, such as Microsoft Word, offers intriguing shapes including diamonds, check marks, and arrows; many in full color. Of course, when writing by hand, bullets may be drawn in any style.
Prior to widespread use of word processors, bullets were often denoted by asterisks, and several word processors automatically convert asterisks to bullets if used at the start of line.
