Aristophanes of Byzantium needed to complete each fragment of text when reading aloud (not to comply with rules of grammar, which were not applied to punctuation marks until thousands of years later). For a short passage (a "komma"), a "stigmḕ mésē" dot was placed mid-level (·). This is the origin of the modern comma punctuation mark, and its name. For a longer passage (a "kolon"), a "hypostigmḗ" dot was placed level with the bottom of the text (.), similar to a modern colon or semicolon, and for very long pauses ("periodos"), a "stigmḕ teleía" point near the top of the line of text
Comma distinguish it from the Arabic diacritic "" (), representing the vowel , which is similarly comma-shaped. In Arabic texts, Western-styled comma () is used as a decimal point. Reversed comma () is used in Sindhi when written in Arabic script. It is different from the standard Arabic comma. Hebrew script is also written from right to left. However, Hebrew punctuation includes only a regular comma (). Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam also use the punctuation mark in similar usage to that of European languages with similar spacing. In the common character encoding systems Unicode and ASCII,