Bracket

A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their names, that vary between British and American English. Brackets, without further qualification, in British English refers to the (...) marks and in American English the [...] marks. Other symbols are repurposed as brackets in specialist contexts, such as those used by linguists.