Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

That symbol is a period when it occurs in text, but a decimal point when it's part of a number, and a dot when you're not quite sure. Likewise, the ! character is an exclamation point in text, a factorial symbol in an equation, and "bang" in certainly technical contexts.

I find it interesting that the British insist on giving it a functional name like "full stop" when they refer to quotation marks purely by their appearance as "inverted commas". Somehow it makes me think of my great-aunt who always called a question mark a "buttonhook".

I wonder what the record is for different names given to the same symbol. The asterisk is also known as a "star" and a "splat", plus any number of specialized names ("wild card", anybody?) If I had to guess I'd say the most-diversely-named typographic symbol is / -- it's a "slash", a "stroke", a "diagonal", a "virgule", a "solidus", a "separatrix"...the list goes on and on.

The # has quite a few aliases too; everything from "octothorpe" to "sharp" to "tic-tac-toe" to "Archie Andrews' hair".