Danda

---

title: "Danda" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["devanagari", "grammar", "syntax", "punctuation"] description: "Punctuation mark in Indic scripts" topic_path: "linguistics" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danda" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Punctuation mark in Indic scripts ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox punctuation mark"]

Field	Value
mark	।
name	Daṇḍa
unicode
::

| mark = । | name = Daṇḍa | unicode = In Indic scripts, the daṇḍa (Sanskrit: दण्ड ** "stick") is a punctuation mark.{{cite book | last = A.M. | first = Ruppel | title = The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit | publisher = Cambridge University Press | date = 2017 | location = New York | pages = 33 | language = English | isbn = 978-1107088283

Use

The daṇḍa marks the end of a sentence or line, comparable to a full stop (period) as commonly used in the Latin alphabet, and is used together with Western punctuation in Hindi and Nepali.

The daṇḍa and double daṇḍa are the only punctuation used in Sanskrit texts. No distinct punctuation is used to mark questions or exclamations, which must be inferred from other aspects of the sentence.

In metrical texts, a double daṇḍa is used to delimit verses, and a single daṇḍa to delimit a pada, line, or semi-verse. In prose, the double daṇḍa is used to mark the end of a paragraph, a story, or section.

Computer encoding

Unicode encodes the daṇḍas as and . The Unicode standard recommends using this character also in other Indic scripts, like Bengali, Telugu, Oriya, and others. Encoding it separately for every Indic script was proposed, but has been accepted. (The graphemes for x0964 and x0965 can be implemented in a computer font with a glyph design that matches the conventional style for those languages.)

Danda and similar characters are encoded separately for some scripts in which its appearance or use is significantly different from the Devanagari one. These include forms with adornments, such as the Rgya Gram Shad.

ISCII encoded daṇḍa at 0xEA.

Footnotes

References

References

1. (2020). "The Unicode® Standard Version 13.0 – Core Specification". The Unicode Consortium.
2. "Public Review Issue #59".
3. "UTN #33: Dandas and More Dandas".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::