In punctuation, the full stop (Commonwealth English) or period (American English) is a punctuation mark placed at the end of a sentence. The full stop glyph is sometimes called a baseline dot because, typographically, it is a dot on the baseline. This term distinguishes the baseline dot from the interpunct (a raised dot).
The full stop glyph is also used for other purposes. It is often placed after an initial letter used to stand for a name, and sometimes placed after each individual letter in an initialism (for example, "U.S.A."; see Acronym#Punctuation). It also has multiple contexts in mathematics and computing, where it may be called dot or point (short fordecimal point).