1358: Numerical Punctuation Aug 30, 2018

Like the quotation mark, the symbols (.) and (,) in mathematics used for separating numbers visually are used differently in different cultures, even though it was not always this way. In most parts of Europe, the (,) is used to separate decimals from whole numbers, and the (.) is used to separate groups of 3-digits to make long numbers easier to interpret; in the US and Britain this is the exact opposite. The reason for this is that multiplication sign (•) was commonly confused for (.), but since English people still largely used (X) for showing multiplication, the British continued with this practice, as is typical for most places outside of Europe.