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Difficultés anglaises

> period A punctuation mark consisting of a small dot (.). Its principal use is to end a sentence that is not a question or an exclamation, as in "They spent the money.", "She is studying hard.", "He has been declared redundant and is very upset." and "Because she is shy, she rarely goes to parties."• The period is also used in decimal fractions, as in "4.5 metres", "6.3 miles" and "12.2 litres". It can also be used in dates, as in "22.2.94", and in times, as in "3.15 tomorrow afternoon".• In modern usage the tendency is to omit full stops from abbreviations. This is most true of abbreviations involving initial capital letters as in TUC, BBC, EEC and USA. In such cases full stops should definitely not be used if one or some of the initial letters do not belong to a full word. Thus, television is abbreviated to TV and educationally subnormal to ESN.• There are usually no period in abbreviations involving the first and letters of a word (contractions) Dr, Mr, Rd, St, but this is a matter of taste.• Abbreviations involving the first few letters of a word, as in "Prof" (Professor) are the most likely to have full stops, as in "Feb." (February), but again this is now a matter of taste.• The period can also be called point or full stop. Pour éviter fautes de grammaire, contresens et confusions. The English Usage Dictionary est le parfait complément des dictionnaires bilingues, du dictionnaire de définitions anglaises et du Thesaurus. Ce dictionnaire signale toutes les difficultés que recèle l'usage d'un mot: orthographe, grammaire, prononciation, homonymies, etc. Exemple d'article du dictionnaire English Usage Dictionary