Ideographic full stop

It ends a sentence, like an English period. The Chinese period (句号) and the Japanese period (句点) are this same character.

Its position shifts with the font and writing direction: in vertical text the circle sits in the upper right of its square. A circle placed differently is still the same symbol, so judge it by shape, not position.

Does 。 mean someone is angry?

No—not from the punctuation alone. In formal Japanese prose, 。 is routine. In a short casual reply, it can give the words a buttoned-up edge. If you want warmth, put it in the wording.

A 2025 study of Japanese university students found punctuated chat messages seemed both more polite and colder than unpunctuated versions. Mixed signal, not an anger detector: read the sender's words and your relationship before treating one circle as a rebuke.

Where did 。 come from?

It grew from older sentence-marking habits. In Song dynasty China, readers added dots beside characters to show where sentences stopped. These were reading aids, long before sentence ends were routinely marked in print.

Chinese reformers proposed a modern punctuation system in 1919 to make publishing in everyday language clearer. In Japan, punctuation spread through schooling and printing in the Meiji period, an era of modernisation under Western influence.