Bullet (typography)
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| Punctuation marks |
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apostrophe ( ' ) ( ’ ) |
| Interword separation |
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spaces: ( ) ( ) ( ) |
| Other typographer's marks |
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ampersand ( & ) |
In typography, a bullet is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list, like below:
- This is the text of a list item. Notice the bullet to the left.
- This is a different list item, and so there is another bullet.
This line is part of the second list item; there is no bullet.
It is most conveniently used in technical writing or reference works to introduce a series of related items. They may be short phrases or of paragraph length. The main point is that all need to be tied together under a general heading. Bulleted items, commonly called "bullets", are usually terminated with a full stop (unless they do not form complete sentences), although it is also a common practice (for example, in Portugal) to terminate every item except the last one with a semicolon.
The bullet corresponds to Unicode character 0x2022. In HTML, the codes • and • give • and •, respectively, but semantics requires that bulleted items be achieved with the appropriate use of the <li> tag inside an unordered list (<ul>). Unicode also defines a triangular bullet ‣ (U+2023).
It is likely that the name 'bullet point' originated from the resemblance of the mark to a bullet.
Bullets are not limited in shape to a black dot (as it is displayed above). A typical word processor offers intriguing shapes such as the circle with 4 colours, the leaf, and the multicoloured square; of course, if you are writing, you are free to 'draw' your bullets in any way you like.
Prior to word processors bullets were denoted by the an asterisk or paired bracets.da:Punkt (typografi) de:Aufzählungszeichen
fr:Puce (typographie)