Brackets and parentheses are punctuation marks used to set apart a segment of text from the surrounding text. (By the way, parentheses is the plural form of parenthesis).
You are, of course, aware of the fact that British English and American English do not always agree. BE lift is elevator in AE; a BE pavement is a sidewalk in AE. Holiday is vacation, handbag is purse, queue is line, tube is subway, etc.
When it comes to brackets and parentheses, the situation is just as confusing.
These marks
are called brackets or round brackets in British English. In American English they are parentheses.
Brackets in American English are called square brackets in British English. They look like this:
Then we have these:
They are called braces in both British and American English, but in BE they are also called curly brackets.
Historically, the earliest form of brackets were angle brackets or chevrons. They look like this:
In a later post we take a look at how to use these brackets and parentheses.
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