Most texts were still written in "scriptura continua", that is without any separation between words. However, the Greeks were sporadically using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually two (dicolon) or three (tricolon)—in around the 5th century BC as an aid in the oral delivery of texts. Greek playwrights such as Euripides and Aristophanes used symbols to distinguish the ends of phrases in written drama: this essentially helped the play's cast to know when to pause. After 200 BC, the Greeks used Aristophanes of Byzantium's system (called ) of a single dot () placed at varying heights to mark up speeches at rhetorical divisions: