high dot

plural high dots

1. grammarSynonym of high point: · or ·.

   Blank also accepts Schmidt’s suggestion [...] that the μέση στιγμή was invented in part to fill the space in the line between the high dot (στιγμή or distinctio) and the low dot (ὑποστιγμή or subdistinctio).

   1985, Thomas N. Habinek, The Colometry of Latin Prose, University of California Press, page 47

   2 more examples

   At the end of a complete sentence (Latin periodus), the speaker paused to take on air, and that pause was sometimes indicated with a high dot ·. A speaker might also pause when he had covered a large portion of a sentence − a member; in Latin this was a colon, the same word used for the “great gut.” If such a pause were indicated at all in writing, it was as a dot on the line, as the period is now written. A shorter division of a periodus was a comma, and the pause to catch the breath after a comma was sometimes shown in writing by a middle dot ⸳.

   1963, David Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law, Little, Brown and Company

   Museum librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium is credited with the punctuation system used later by Greek grammarians in the Alexandrian schools, dividing discourse into sections by means of a pointing system of dots: middle dot [⸳] a the end of a brief clause (‘komma’) for the pause we mark with our comma; low dot on the line [.] for a long clause (‘kolon’), like our colon or semicolon; and high dot [·] to close a sentence (‘periodos’), like our full stop; distinctions not consistently used.

   2002, Fernando Poyatos, Nonverbal Communication Across Disciplines, volume 3. Narrative literature, theater, cinema, translation, John Benjamins Publishing Company, page 127

   Synonyms: high point