Middle Dot

The Middle Dot at U+00B7 is a centered punctuation mark used as a separator, multiplication sign, or word-internal dot depending on context. It is in the Latin-1 Supplement block, which makes it common in Western text encodings and older digital documents. Its most visible everyday role is in Catalan orthography, where it appears in the digraph l·l to show a geminated “l,” as in paral·lel and col·legi. In typography and editing, it is also used as an interpunct to separate compact items such as names, navigation links, or short labels when a full bullet would feel too heavy. In mathematics and science, the character can mark multiplication or a dot product, especially in plain-text notes: a · b may mean the scalar product of two vectors, and 3 · 4 means multiplication. Chemistry, physics, and engineering writing also use centered dots in formulas and units, though specialized mathematical dot characters may be preferred in formal typesetting. It should not be confused with the ordinary period, the bullet, or decimal point punctuation. Search and matching can be sensitive to that distinction, which matters for Catalan words and technical notation copied from formatted sources.