high dot

— 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 ⸳.