Word divider  In punctuation, a word divider is a glyph that separates written words. In languages which use the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as other scripts of Europe and West Asia, the word divider is a blank space, or "whitespace". This convention is spreading, along with other aspects of European punctuation, to Asia and Africa, where words are usually written without word separation. In character encoding, word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers. In Ancient Egyptian, determinatives may have been used as much to demarcate word boundaries as to disambiguate the semantics of words. Rarely in Assyrian cuneiform, but commonly in the later cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet, a vertical stroke 𒑰 was used to separate words. In Old Persian cuneiform, a diagonally sloping wedge was used. As the alphabet spread throughout the ancient world, words were often run together without division, and this practice remains or remained until recently in much of South and Southeast Asia. However, not infrequently in inscriptions a vertical line, and in manuscripts a single (·), double (:), or triple interpunct (dot) was used to divide words. This practice was found in Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and continues today with Ethiopic, though there whitespace is gaining ground. The early alphabetic writing systems, such as the Phoenician alphabet, had only signs for consonants (although some signs for consonants could also stand for a vowel, so-called "matres lectionis"). Without some form of visible word dividers, parsing a text into its separate words would have been a puzzle. With the introduction of letters representing vowels in the Greek alphabet, the need for inter-word separation lessened. The earliest Greek inscriptions used interpuncts, as was common in the writing systems which preceded it, but soon the practice of "scriptio continua", continuous writing in which all words ran together without separation became common. The interpunct died out in Latin only after the Classic period, sometime around the year 200 CE, as the Greek style of "scriptio continua" became fashionable. In the 7th century, Irish monks started using blank spaces, and introduced their script to France. By the 8th or 9th century, spacing was being used fairly consistently across Europe . Alphabetic writing without inter-word separation, known as "scriptio continua", was used in Ancient Egyptian.