The only thing I've been able to find was a non-cited reference to its origins in the 19th century on Wikipedia. There are plenty of sites on their usage and shapes, but nothing as to when or who coined the expression bullet point. Their use, according to Google Ngrams, sky-rockets sometime around , peaking in , which seems odd to me if they originated a century or more earlier.
Edit: The coining of the phrase who first used 'bullet points' and when is the primary interest. If someone knows the origins of the bullet or other symbol usage I would also be interested. I accept that the latter of these may be out of scope, so disregard at your leisure.
That is, a bullet-point list is a list of points you are making in a presentation. For example, a Harvard Graphics manual the predecessor of PowerPoint in says:. Pressing Enter a third time creates the first bullet point and places the cursor to the right of the bullet. However, the term "bullet point" was very quickly transferred to mean the symbol as well. Looking through 19th century books, I can't find any bulleted lists. Lists are either indexed by numbers, or items are identified with spacing and indentation.
When typewriters started being widely used in the early part of the 20th century, people started preparing typed documents with less care than they had taken with printed materials, and it was too much trouble to renumber lists while editing documents. So they started using asterisks instead of numbers. Printers took these lists marked by asterisks and used typographical bullet symbols instead. The bullet is not new, nor is its name.
It has been used by typographers long before the general public caught hold of it. You asked about the origin of the bullet for this purpose. Bullet was used by typographers as the name of the mark or ornament long before the general typewriter-bound public became aware of it. Bullets are commonly hung in the margin to mark items in a list, or centered to separate larger blocks of text.
See also midpoint. The blackletter midpoint used by Gutenberg for his blackletter face was not round, but square and rotated 45 degrees so that there was a point at the top. A hand compositor or even someone using a Linotype or Monotype machine would nearly always have several possible weights of midpoint available, with the heavier ones serving as what you think of as a bullet.
In modern typography, think of dingbats as one one example of this. So in fact, typographers and scribes have always used bullets for this purpose. It is only those laboring under the tyranny of the typewriter who normally had to go without. Although often used as such, this is very much a light-weight bullet, there because it was needed for languages like Catalan as Bringhurst points out further down in the section that I quoted above.
In Graphic Design in Germany: — , by Jeremy Aynsley , the author notes in describing a work published in that:. Footnoting was marked by a disc bullet-point set in the text with the note in lighter type in the margin. Bullets are so-named because they are round.
The etymology is. Since the objects fired by guns used to be round balls, they became known as boulettes, or bullets. Similarly, the little round circles that adorn paper are also "little balls". And when you order spaghetti and meatballs in French, it comes with "boulettes", or small balls of meat.
Bullet point with reference to a typographic marker seems to be the application of an older expression bullet replacing the prefix mid- in another old technical expression midpoint , and the timing of that substitution process seems to be the point of the OP question.
Unlike modern bullets, the first projectile was a small round "ball," from boulette in French. The little round dot of a bullet point is likewise a small round "ball", or bullet in English.
In The Elements of Typographic Style , published in , Robert Bringhurst defined bullet with respect to typography p :. A large version of the midpoint used as a typographic flag. Bullets are commonly hung, like numbers in the left margin to mark items in a list, or centered on the measure to separate blocks of text.
Old French point , a dot or prick , L prictum , a dot , neuter of prictus , pp. The noun definition 19 describes the text being emphasized by a bullet point implying an adjectival function for bullet. The verb definitions describe the function of inserting a bullet point. Inquiring minds respond to a rambling explanation: "What is your point? They are often seen in the work of Modernist designers of the s and s and the glyphs used have been in printers typefaces since at least the 19th century.
Bullet points can help business writers organize and emphasize information quickly and effectively. Here is what I recommend: Use a period full stop after every bullet point that is a sentence as these bullets do. Use no punctuation after bullets that are not sentences and do not complete the stem. Use all sentences or all fragments, not a mixture. Here is what we recommend: Use a period after every bullet point that is a sentence. This means to add a full stop after every bullet point.
Use no punctuation after bullets that are not sentences. The capitalization and punctuation for each bulleted item depends on the structure of the sentence. For example: This is a sentence. Within your Microsoft document, place your cursor or highlight the text where you wish to insert a bulleted list. You can use the Insert Symbol option in Excel to insert bullet points in Excel.
Need even more definitions? Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms The same, but different. Merriam-Webster's Words of the Week - Nov. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs.
What Is 'Semantic Bleaching'? How 'literally' can mean "figuratively". Literally How to use a word that literally drives some pe Is Singular 'They' a Better Choice? The awkward case of 'his or her'. Take the quiz.
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