It's called a full stop, damnit. A period is the time between events of a recurring phenomenon. Where did "period" come from to describe a full stop? They're all out to confuse me.
Because the word period has many meanings one of which is "termination" ("death put a period to his endeavors"; "a change soon put a period to my tranquility"*) so it's being substituted in for "full stop."
*from dictionary.com which also supplied:
Word History: Many may have wondered why the word period has the sense “punctuation mark (.)” as well as several senses having to do with time. The answer to this question lies in one of the senses of the Greek word periodos from which our word is descended. Periodos, made up of peri-, “around,” and hodos, “way,” in addition to meaning such things as “going around, way around, going around in a circle, circuit,” and with regard to time, “cycle or period of time,” referred in rhetoric to “a group of words organically related in grammar and sense.” The Greek word was adopted into Latin as perihodos, which in the Medieval Latin period acquired a new sense related to its use in rhetoric, “a punctuation mark used at the end of a rhetorical period.” This sense is not recorded in English until 1609, but the word had already entered English as a borrowing from Old French in the sense “a cycle of recurrence of a disease,” first being recorded in a work written around 1425.
Because the word period has many meanings one of which is "termination" ("death put a period to his endeavors"; "a change soon put a period to my tranquility"*) so it's being substituted in for "full stop."
I have to admit, I have never heard any of those uses for period in England or Ireland, ever. Ok, I'm not the most widely-read person on the planet, though I'm pretty deeply-read (Y'know, like I read lots and lots and lots, but it's all fantasy :) ) so it's possible it's just me. But I think it's equally possible it's just an American-ism. Now this doesn't stop it being an archaic form formally used in England, as an awful lot of American-English oddities we laugh at are simply common 17th century forms of English, or just ones that evolved differently from the same root as their British-English counterparts.
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*from dictionary.com which also supplied:
Word History: Many may have wondered why the word period has the sense “punctuation mark (.)” as well as several senses having to do with time. The answer to this question lies in one of the senses of the Greek word periodos from which our word is descended. Periodos, made up of peri-, “around,” and hodos, “way,” in addition to meaning such things as “going around, way around, going around in a circle, circuit,” and with regard to time, “cycle or period of time,” referred in rhetoric to “a group of words organically related in grammar and sense.” The Greek word was adopted into Latin as perihodos, which in the Medieval Latin period acquired a new sense related to its use in rhetoric, “a punctuation mark used at the end of a rhetorical period.” This sense is not recorded in English until 1609, but the word had already entered English as a borrowing from Old French in the sense “a cycle of recurrence of a disease,” first being recorded in a work written around 1425.
From:
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From:
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I have to admit, I have never heard any of those uses for period in England or Ireland, ever. Ok, I'm not the most widely-read person on the planet, though I'm pretty deeply-read (Y'know, like I read lots and lots and lots, but it's all fantasy :) ) so it's possible it's just me. But I think it's equally possible it's just an American-ism. Now this doesn't stop it being an archaic form formally used in England, as an awful lot of American-English oddities we laugh at are simply common 17th century forms of English, or just ones that evolved differently from the same root as their British-English counterparts.