high dot

high dot (plural high dots)

1. (grammar) Synonym of high point: · or ·.
   • 1963, David Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law‎^[1], Little, Brown and Company:

     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 ⸳.

   • 1985, Thomas N. Habinek, The Colometry of Latin Prose‎^[2], University of California Press, page 47:

     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).

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

     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.