Between words Modern English uses a space to separate words, but not all languages follow this practice. According to Paul Saenger in
Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Ancient Hebrew and
Arabic did use spaces partly to compensate in clarity for the
lack of written vowels when no was used for a vowel, though in the Middle Ages they sometimes omitted spaces when vowel points were marked. The earliest Greek script also used interpuncts to divide words rather than spacing, although this practice was soon displaced by the . In
Latin, spaces and interpuncts came often to be dropped in favor of , and were not used to separate words again until roughly AD 600–800. Word spacing was later used by Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes, beginning after the creation of the
Carolingian minuscule by
Alcuin of York and the scribes’ adoption of it. Spacing would become standard in
Renaissance Italy and France, and then
Byzantium by the end of the 16th century; then entering into the Slavic languages in
Cyrillic in the 17th century, and only in modern times entering modern
Sanskrit.
CJK languages do not use spaces when dealing with text containing mostly
Chinese characters and
kana. In
Japanese, spaces may occasionally be used to separate people’s
family names from
given names, to denote omitted
particles (especially the topic particle
wa), and for certain literary or artistic effects. Modern
Korean, however, has spaces as an essential part of its writing system (because of Western influence), given the phonetic nature of the
hangul script that requires word dividers to avoid ambiguity, as opposed to Chinese characters which are mostly very distinguishable from each other. In Korean, spaces are used to separate chunks of nouns, nouns and
particles, adjectives, and verbs; for certain compounds or phrases, spaces may be used or not, as in the phrase for “
Republic of Korea,” usually spelled without spaces as rather than with a space as .
Runic texts use either an
interpunct-like or a
colon-like punctuation mark to separate words. There are two
Unicode characters dedicated for this: and .
Between sentences Languages with a Latin-derived alphabet have used various methods of sentence spacing since the advent of movable type in the 15th century. • One space (some times called
French spacing,
q.v.). This is a common convention in most countries that use the
ISO basic Latin alphabet for published and final written work, as well as digital (World Wide Web) media.
Web browsers usually do not differentiate between single and multiple spaces in source code when displaying text, unless the text is given a "white-space"
CSS attribute. Without this being set,
collapsing strings of spaces to a single space allow HTML source code to be spaced in a more machine-readable way, at the expense of control over the spacing of the rendered page. • Double space (
English spacing). It is sometimes claimed that this convention stems from the use of the
monospaced font on
typewriters. However, instructions to use more spacing between sentences than words date back centuries, and two spaces on a typewriter was the closest approximation to typesetters' previous rules aimed at improving readability. Wider spacing continued to be used by both typesetters and typists until the
Second World War, after which typesetters gradually transitioned to word spacing between sentences in published print, while typists continued the practice of using two spaces. • One widened space, typically one-and-a-third to slightly less than twice as wide as a word space. This spacing was sometimes used in typesetting before the 19th century. It has also been used in other non-typewriter typesetting systems such as the
Linotype machine and the
TeX system. Modern computer-based digital fonts can adjust the spacing after terminal punctuation as well, creating a
space slightly wider than a standard word space. There has been some
controversy regarding the proper amount of sentence spacing in typeset material. The
Elements of Typographic Style states that only a single word space is required for sentence spacing. Psychological studies suggest "readers benefit from having two spaces after periods."
Unit symbols and numbers The
International System of Units (SI) prescribes inserting a space between a number and a
unit of measurement (the space being regarded as an implied multiplication sign) but never between a prefix and a base unit; a space (or a
multiplication dot) should also be used between units in compound units. The only exception to this rule is the traditional symbolic notation of
angles:
degree (e.g., 30°),
minute of arc (e.g., 22′), and
second of arc (e.g., 8″). The SI also prescribes the use of a space (often typographically a
thin space) as a
thousands separator where required. Both the point and the comma are reserved as
decimal markers. Sometimes a
narrow non-breaking space or
non-breaking space, respectively, is recommended (as in, for example,
IEEE Standards and
IEC standards) to avoid the separation of units and values or parts of compounds units, due to automatic
line wrap and word wrap. ==Encoding==