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When an abbreviation appears at the end of a sentence, only one period is used: The capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. In the past, some initialisms were styled with a period after each letter and a space between each pair. For example, U. S., but today this is typically US.
Such an extension at the bottom of a letter is called a tail. It may be specified as left or right depending on which direction it turns, as in ɳ right-tail n , ɻ right-tail turned r , ɲ left-tail n , ʐ tail z (or just retroflex z ), etc. Note that ŋ is called eng or engma , ɱ meng , and ꜧ heng .
The first cell in each row gives a symbol; The second is a link to the article that details that symbol, using its Unicode standard name or common alias. (Holding the mouse pointer on the hyperlink will pop up a summary of the symbol's function.);
Chao tone letters generally appear after each syllable, for a language with syllable tone ( a˧vɔ˥˩ ), or after the phonological word, for a language with word tone ( avɔ˧˥˩ ). The IPA gives the option of placing the tone letters before the word or syllable ( ˧a˥˩vɔ , ˧˥˩avɔ ), but this is rare for lexical tone.
It may be placed after an initial letter used to abbreviate a word. It is often placed after each individual letter in acronyms and initialisms (e.g. "U.S."). However, the use of full stops after letters in an initialism or acronym is declining, and many of these without punctuation have become accepted norms (e.g., "UK" and "NATO"). [b]
The a-e ligature ash (Æ æ) was adopted as a letter in its own right, named after a futhorc rune æsc. In very early Old English the o-e ligature ethel (Œ œ) also appeared as a distinct letter, likewise named after a rune, œðel. [citation needed] Additionally, the v–v or u-u ligature double-u (W w) was in use.
However, there are only 26 letters in the modern English alphabet, so there is not a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Many sounds are spelled using different letters or multiple letters, and for those words whose pronunciation is predictable from the spelling, the sounds denoted by the letters depend on the surrounding letters.
In printing, normal sentence case may be substituted by UPPER CASE or "all caps" (all letters are capitalized), and Title Case (where the first letter of each word is capitalized). Capitals are sometimes used and sometimes not used after a colon, [5] although they are used in some citation systems such as APA style when beginning an independent ...