By Peter Askew | July 30, 2007 - 9:20 pm - Posted in Uncategorized

Driving up from Portland back to Seattle today, my small vacation about to end, a random thought crossed my mind..

I may be thinking waay too much into this, but

consider the typed character “.”

as domainers, we all know this character as “dot”, ie dot com

I find it interesting that the radio pronounces this character as “point”, as in 98 point 9 FM..

I wonder if there are any radio stations out there that pronounce their name as “98 dot 9 FM”, or any websites that promote themselves as “website point com”..probably not on the latter, as I’d take that to be websitepointcom.com..

very interesting how the word “dot” became so closely associated with the online world..

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1 Comment

  1. July 30, 2007 @ 11:03 pm


    It’s “point” in radio because it’s a decimal point, separating the ones place from the tenths place. That’s not what it is in a website address, so I wouldn’t expect to see it there. Similarly, it’s “period” or “full stop” if one is reading a sentence aloud along with the punctuation. Computer programmers (and users of various kinds) have a long history of calling that character a “dot” when used in various computing contexts that long predate the world wide web, so its name in web addresses comes as no surprise.

    Posted by Confabulist

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