# How many spaces between sentences? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 22, 2010, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-spaces-between-sentences/554703 "2010-09-22T21:36:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 143
**Author:** ![Capt.Ridley\_s\_Shooting\_Party](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/cc9497/32.png) [@Capt.Ridley\_s\_Shooting\_Party](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-spaces-between-sentences/554703/143 "2010-09-27T16:31:27Z")
> [@What's Up With People Still Double-Spacing After a Period](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-up-with-people-still-double-spacing-after-a-period/492858/82): > > …IMHO, two spaces between sentences doesn’t look better or enhance clarity, which is probably why virtually every bit of **typeset** print that everyone here has ever read in their lives only has a single space between sentences. Look at any professionally-produced magazine or book if you don’t believe me. > > You only see two spaces in monospaced, typed documents and word-processed documents by people who still think that the modern word processor is a typewriter. No you don’t. As I mentioned in a previous thread (can’t be bothered looking, but I remember **pulykammel** was involved) there’s plenty of examples of typeset documents with double or one-and-a-half spacing after a full stop. From what I can gather, the “hard and fast rule” that everybody talks about when referencing double spacing is anything but, and a relatively recent innovation. Witness Wikipedia’s take on [Sentence Spacing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing), for instance: > [@](#): > > Since the introduction of movable-type printing in Europe, various sentence spacing conventions have been used in languages with a Latin-derived alphabet.[2] > These include a normal word space (as between the words in a sentence), a single enlarged space, and two full spaces. Although modern digital fonts can automatically adjust a single word space to create visually pleasing and consistent spacing following terminal punctuation,[3] most debate is about whether to strike a keyboard’s spacebar once or twice between sentences.[4] Besides, I’ll say again, virtually every typeset mathematics, physics and computer science textbook uses English spacing, or a near approximation of it. There are still plenty of typeset books being produced today that eschew single spacing, in favour of enlarged spaces after full stops. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-spaces-between-sentences/554703)._