‘Dot’, ‘period’, ‘full stop’, and ‘point’ in English

These four expressions, dot, period, full stop, and point, are often confused by learners. The distinction is actually rather simple. The little dot which you can find at the end of a sentence is called period in American English and full stop in British English, even when you “pronounce” the full stop for emphasis; for example, a father arguing with his daughter could say:

The term dot is used when pronouncing the character in domain names; for example, “www.jakubmarian.com” would be pronounced

A funny thing to notice here is that WWW is an abbreviation of “World Wide Web” that contains three times more syllables in its spoken form than the term it is supposed to abbreviate.

Finally, the term point refers to the dot glyph used in numbers to separate the fractional part from the integer part (unlike many other languages, English uses a decimal point, not a decimal comma). The numbers after the decimal point are pronounced in isolation, e.g.