For the Wikipedia policy on brackets, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style § Brackets and parentheses. However, in other languages like German, if brackets enclose text in italics, they are usually also set in italics. In English, typographers mostly prefer not to set brackets in italics, even when the enclosed text is italic.

In 1961, ASCII contained parenthesis, square, and curly brackets, and also less-than and greater-than signs that could be used as angle brackets. Square brackets appeared with some teleprinters.īraces (curly brackets) first became part of a character set with the 8-bit code of the IBM 7030 Stretch. Most typewriters only had the left and right parenthesis. Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus coined the term lunula to refer to the round brackets or parentheses ( ) recalling the shape of the crescent moon ( Latin: luna). Various forms of brackets are used in mathematics, with specific mathematical meanings, often for denoting specific mathematical functions and subformulas.Īngle brackets or chevrons ⟨ ⟩ were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English. There are also various less common symbols considered brackets. In British usage they are known as round brackets (or simply 'brackets'), square brackets, curly brackets, and angle brackets in American usage they are respectively known as parentheses, brackets, braces, and chevrons.

There are four primary types of brackets. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'right' bracket or, alternatively, an 'opening bracket' or 'closing bracket', respectively, depending on the directionality of the context. A bracket, as used in British English, is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings.

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