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Typographical symbols and punctuation marks are marks and symbols used in typography with a variety of purposes such as to help with legibility and accessibility, or to identify special cases. This list gives those most commonly encountered with Latin script .
Hazard symbols; List of mathematical constants (typically letters and compound symbols) Glossary of mathematical symbols; List of physical constants (typically letters and compound symbols) List of common physics notations (typically letters used as variable names in equations) Rod of Asclepius / Caduceus as a symbol of medicine
The word symbol derives from the late Middle French masculine noun symbole, which appeared around 1380 in a theological sense signifying a formula used in the Roman Catholic Church as a sort of synonym for 'the credo'; by extension in the early Renaissance it came to mean 'a maxim' or 'the external sign of a sacrament'; these meanings were lost in secular contexts.
The symbol # is known variously in English-speaking regions as the number sign, [1] hash, [2] or pound sign. [3] The symbol has historically been used for a wide range of purposes including the designation of an ordinal number and as a ligatured abbreviation for pounds avoirdupois – having been derived from the now-rare ℔ .
The asterisk (/ ˈ æ s t ər ɪ s k / *), from Late Latin asteriscus, from Ancient Greek ἀστερίσκος, asteriskos, "little star", [1] [2] is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
The symbol was introduced originally in 1770 by Nicolas de Condorcet, who used it for a partial differential, and adopted for the partial derivative by Adrien-Marie Legendre in 1786. [3] It represents a specialized cursive type of the letter d , just as the integral sign originates as a specialized type of a long s (first used in print by ...
Computer programmers use the tilde in various ways and sometimes call the symbol (as opposed to the diacritic) a squiggle, squiggly, swiggle, or twiddle. According to the Jargon File , other synonyms sometimes used in programming include not , approx , wiggle , enyay (after eñe ) and (humorously) sqiggle / ˈ s k ɪ ɡ əl / .
The Computer Modern fonts replace it with an "E.T." symbol in the cmti# (text italic) fonts, so it can be entered as {\it\&} in running text when using the default (Computer Modern) fonts. [ 39 ] In Microsoft Windows menus, labels, and other captions, the ampersand is used to denote the next letter as a keyboard shortcut (called an "Access key ...