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Types of Parentheses

Angle Brackets
Angle Brackets

When nested parentheses are needed, brackets are used as a substitute for the inner pair of parentheses within the outer pair. When deeper levels of nesting are needed, convention is to alternate between parentheses and brackets at each level.

Curly Brackets
Curly Brackets

If you’ve ever wondered when to favor parentheses over square brackets and when to stick in a pair of curly braces, listen on. Parentheses. You’re probably well versed in how to use those sideways eyebrow thingies, better known as parentheses. First, remember that a pair of them is called “parentheses,” whereas a single one is a “parenthesis.” You may want to review episode 222 in which we compared parentheses to dashes and commas.

Double Brackets
Double Brackets

Garner's Modern American Usage has this on nested parentheses under an entry for square brackets ([ ]): brackets often show parentheses within parentheses Smith and her commander (Robert Parnell, also a [helicopter] pilot) both survived the crash.

Floor and Ceiling Corners
Floor and Ceiling Corners

To eliminate confusion, some use the word form. The word form actually contains the word “ceil” and “floor” to indicate the function and the number that is enclosed inside the parentheses. There is a rule that there should be no space between the function being used and the parentheses.

Lenticular Brackets
Lenticular Brackets

The idea of “bracket-like” characters might be more or less be identified with the General Category (gc) property values of Ps (Punctuation, open) and Pe (Punctuation, close). This category contains a few dozens of paired punctuation marks, mostly excluding quotation marks (categories Pi and Pf).

image: i2symbol.com
Parentheses
Parentheses

Parenthesis is of course Greek and means in fact "insertion". It has taken the meaning of the signs " ( " or " ) ". Parentheses is the regular plural. Usually, you use a pair of the signs showing an insertion, then "between parentheses" - or brackets ; however, "in parenthesis" means : as an afterthought.

Quine Corners and Half Brackets
Quine Corners and Half Brackets

A hole in the papyrus has obliterated βου π, but these letters are supplied by an ancient commentary on the poem. Second intermittent sources can be between ⸢ and ⸣. Quine corners are sometimes used instead of half brackets. The brackets stand for a function that maps a linguistic expression to its “denotation” or semantic value.

image: charbase.com
Square Brackets
Square Brackets

Parentheses and brackets ( ) [ ] Round Brackets Round brackets (also called parentheses, especially in American English) are mainly used to separate off information that isn’t essential to the meaning of the rest of the sentence.

Related Types