Ive wondered about curly bracket. Now im a bit more informed. TY
Good point. I think I don’t really pay much attention to the exact form of certain marks and characters. The same is probably true of quotes.
Also… Are these: <> called 'angle brackets everywhere or just here?
(also also those are just the greater than and less than math comparison operators. Are there different forms for actual angle brackets?)
Mangetout:
Also… Are these: <> called 'angle brackets everywhere or just here?
(also also those are just the greater than and less than math comparison operators. Are there different forms for actual angle brackets?)
They’re used to format links for web pages. I’ve never seen them called anything but greater than and less than, though.
I’ve seen them used informally in sort of emoji-like contexts, but often indicating a slightly more complex or non-standard action than a single emoji would.
<runs naked through thread>
Or sometimes to add HTML-like tagging to a sentence, but in a human-readable sense, <sarcasm>obviously</sarcasm>
Angle brackets are sometimes used in math for vectors, like this: \langle 3, 4 \rangle
Typeset properly, they’re not the same as less than/greater than symbols. 3 < 4
There are several other uses in math as well. For example, \mathbb{R}[x]/\langle x^2+1\rangle is the quotient of the ring of polynomials by the ideal generated by x^2+1, which is what the term in angle brackets represents. And yes, they’re called angle brackets in this context and are distinct from “less than” and “greater than.” In LaTeX, they’re called \langle and \rangle.
langlerangle would be a great user name.
There are also guillemets ‹›«», which French uses to mark quotations. They come in single and double versions, but the single versions also resemble angle brackets (though they’re usually only on the bottom half of the line, like lower-case letters).
Mainly called parentheses here in the US. Certainly called ‘brackets’ if you’re in a font oriented industry but parentheses is such common usage among lay people that even technical documents will have the highly meta clarification ‘(parentheses)’ included.
Personally I prefer to call ‘{}’ by the nonstandard name ‘squiggly brackets’. Doesn’t seem to have caught on much though.
Yeah, I think it must be very common - I get quite a lot of ‘ummm actually…’ miscorrections whenever I read out () as ‘brackets’.
Fair enough, and makes sense, but I am sure I have seen regular brackets used more often in the specific context of ideals of rings to denote the ideal generated by a set of elements.
Example: \mathbb{R} are the real numbers, \mathbb R\langle x,y\rangle is the free ring over \mathbb{R} generated by [non-commuting] variables x and y, and finally
\mathbb{R}\langle x,y\rangle \big/ (x^2+1,\,y^2+1,\,xy+yx)
is the algebra of quaternions.
It’s definitely one of those things where the notation isn’t set in stone, and authors tend to use whatever they’ve seen before or makes sense to them at the time. I don’t think I’ve seen that notation \mathbb{R}\langle x,y \rangle before, but I work a lot more with commutative rings than noncommutative ones. If you’re going to use that notation, you’ll definitely want a notation for the ideal that doesn’t use angle brackets.
Yes. I, in Canada, learned them as round brackets, square brackets, curly brackets, and also angle brackets <> (true angle brackets are taller and skinnier than the less-than and greater-than signs I added here), and corner brackets 「 」(used in Japanese text).
So do you ever use the words “parentheses” or “parenthetical”?
I use that writing device sometimes. I prefer to use an an em dash. Typing a hyphen twice will give you an em dash in some word processing programs but if not, double hyphens work well, IMO.
[Bolding mine]
If font oriented people call parentheses ‘brackets’ then what do they call ‘brackets’?
I worked in a print shop for several years (years ago). Parentheses were always called ‘parentheses’. In that shop, at least.
Parentheses and brackets are two separate things.
[added this to my previous post just above]
Where you live, perhaps. Where I live, brackets are the whole family of paired enclosing marks, with the curved type (being the most common) not requiring any other qualifier than just ‘brackets’.
Other types of brackets have a descriptive qualifier such as square or curly.
Yes, quite right. It will depend on where you live and what form of English you’re using. I suppose I was responding to @TriPolar who said that “font-oriented industries” refer to parentheses as ‘brackets’. Perhaps they also weren’t talking about American English but they did say “… parentheses is such common usage among lay people…” which to me implies American English.
Yeah, I would have expected professions such as typography, typesetting and design to use the more formal terms such as parentheses, braces, etc.