Word spacing in manuscripts
Separación de palabras con espacios
- Date
- c. century VII-VIII · confidence medium
- Place
- Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, Ireland
- Credited to
- Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
The habit of leaving spaces between words in Latin manuscripts, so that non-native speakers of Latin could read them. It made silent, fast reading possible.
It was a gradual practice, argued by Paul Saenger, with precedents in Roman inscriptions with interpuncts.
What it led to
- silent, faster reading
- a break with Graeco-Roman scriptio continua
- the base of modern punctuation
Built on
- Latin alphabet