In
punctuation, a
word divider is a glyph that separates written words. In languages which use the
Latin,
Cyrillic, and
Arabic alphabets, as well as other languages of Europe and the Mideast, the word divider is a blank
space, or
whitespace, a convention which is spreading, along with other aspects of European punctuation, to Asia and Africa. However, many languages of East Asia are written without word separation (Saenger 2000).
In Ancient Egyptian, determinatives may have been used as much to demarcate word boundaries as to disambiguate the semantics of words.[1] Rarely in Assyrian cuneiform, but commonly in the later cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet, a vertical stroke ?? was used to separate words.
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 (ยท), 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.
The interpunct died out in Latin after the Classic period, sometime around the year 200 CE. In the 7th century Irish monks started using blank spaces, and introduced their script to France. By the 8th or 9th century spacing was being used fairly consistently across Europe (Knight 1996).
