Talk:Word divider

Romans, not Greeks

It was the Romans, not the Greeks, who used interpuncts.

I augmented the history a bit.

Ducky

Thai?

"Today Chinese and Japanese are the main scripts consistently written without punctuation to separate words." I believe Thai (which is certainly a major language) also lacks marks between words, but an expert on Thai should decide. There might be other Southeast Asian languages that do that--Laotian? Mcswell (talk) 01:15, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Terms

According to Daniels&Bright's _The World's Writing Systems_, Ethiopic is a better term than Amharic. Amharic and Geez are written with the same script (originally used for Ge'ez).

It isn't clear if Ethiopic always (since 400 AD) had interword separation, or if that's something that appeared more recently.

Ducky

Well, _The World's Writing Systems_, edited by Daniels & Bright (and a fine book!) implies that Phoenician at one point used slashes and dots and that Hebrew and Aramaic did; plus Aramaic also used spaces.

There's a picture in Daniels & Bright of a 440 BCE manuscript in Hebrew that clearly shows spaces between the words.

Ducky

I've often heard that Charlemagne was mostly responsible for the introduction and use of the space (punctuation) in European languages, although I don't have direct confirmation of this. Something that might be looked into, as the article needs expanding at the end. --G Gordon Worley III 14:05, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I once heard someone say, "Theoretically there are no spaces in Thai, but I prefer to believe that they're there [in handwriting], because it's easier to read that way." —Tamfang 05:39, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Thai, and, I believe, Khmer, are special cases with regard to spaces: if my understanding is correct, spaces are used to indicate divisions between phrases, and not sentences. Omniglot says: "There are no spaces between words, instead spaces in a Thai text indicate the end of a clause or sentence." AncientScripts.com has: "There is no space or any kind of separator between words, so all the words in a sentence form one long block of letters. The only division, a space, occurs between sentences or phrases." I'm going to go ahead and add a mention of this to the article, but further citations would be welcome. --babbage 09:55, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

arab influence?

In „A History of Reading“ (Reaktion: London 2003, S. 162, see Google-Books) Steven Roger Fischer writes, that the word-seperation by blanks has been introduced because arab language was using it (translation from greek, without blank, to arab with blank, to latin with blank). In the article just some Irish influence is mentioned. --Kommerz (talk) 15:05, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

< wbr /> causing unintended line breaks

Just in case <wbr/> (and our template {{wbr}}) causes unintended and unexpected line-breaks for someone, using (only) &zwsp; might be a solution. See Template_talk:R#Line_breaks. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:09, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Significant doubt concerning historical claims about Semitic languages

> As the alphabet spread throughout the ancient world, words were often run together without division, and this practice remains or remained until recently in much of South and Southeast Asia. However, not infrequently in inscriptions a vertical line, and in manuscripts a single (·), double (:), or triple (⫶) interpunct (dot) was used to divide words. This practice was found in Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and continues today with Ethiopic, though there whitespace is gaining ground.

This seems to be claiming that using whitespace as a word separator only started in the early Middle Ages (Carolingian Renaissance). But if you look at pictures of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- of which there are many on Wikipedia -- and remember that it dates to between 100 BC and 100 AD, you'll see that the words are clearly separated by only whitespace. Can an expert on Semitic languages, like Ancient Hebrew, Phoenician or Aramic, check when whitespace was used versus interpuncts? Svennik (talk) 20:58, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

I don't read the passage you quote as claiming that whitespace was never used in the ancient world until now where it is "gaining ground". Although it could be read that way. It would be nice to have further info on those other languages, as you say.

I think the source for this uncited claim is supposed to be (Saenger 2000), since that's the source for the similar claim in the lede, but since it doesn't list a page number I'm not going to wade through it trying to verify. Dingolover6969 (talk) 02:53, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

"U+205E" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect U+205E has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 May 27 § U+205E until a consensus is reached. Rusalkii (talk) 06:12, 27 May 2025 (UTC)

Grunt work

Recently, I have entered into the page a sfn from Unicode (2025) about the ethiopic wordspace. An excellent thing to do for this page would be to ctrl-f through the Unicode core spec there for every instance of "word separator" or "word divider" and make similar footnotes. Ideally in exactly the same detailed style as I have done. While the Unicode core spec is of limited use in terms of linguists or historics, this would at least allow us to cite various characters as word separators — and probably discover some new ones, like U+10A9D 𐪝 OLD NORTH ARABIAN NUMBER ONE. The only problem is that it's a significant amount of work, so I haven't done it yet. I tried to get an LLM to do it but it immediately made enough omissions that I don't trust it. Dingolover6969 (talk) 09:47, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

By the way, we may want to use each relevant citation multiple times on the page (once next to each character the relevant paragraph mentions, if it mentions several), which means that for those we may have to use {{harvnb}} rather than {{sfn}}, it seems (so that we can define a ref name for it and reuse that). We could also switch over to using {{r}}, probably, although I haven't looking into that Dingolover6969 (talk) 11:42, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

wealth of knowledge in wingo

the Wingo source has a lot of info about the early history of the interpunct in Latin that isn't on this page yet Dingolover6969 (talk) 11:47, 26 May 2026 (UTC)