Devanagari Danda

It closes prose sentences and smaller verse units. The danda works as a full stop in Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit prose. In Sanskrit verse, the same purna viram can close a half-verse without ending the sentence, so read its placement, not just the stroke.

It evolved rather than being invented: early writing used straight or curved single strokes sporadically, then settled on single and double marks for smaller and larger divisions. The job was practical — guiding readers through texts that could lack modern punctuation and even spaces between words.

By the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi texts are described as using the single and double marks at the ends of prose sentences and poetic units. That verse logic still holds: । and ॥ mark different sizes of break.

Why does Hindi use । instead of .?

It is the native stop, though Hindi also uses Latin punctuation. Modern Hindi freely borrows commas, question marks and sometimes the period; the danda sits most naturally in traditional and formal text. Match the punctuation already in use.

Single and double dandas occur across many scripts descended from ancient Brahmi, the ancestor of most South Asian alphabets, where they mark phrase, verse or section boundaries. The ASCII | only looks similar.