words as presbyterian, catholic and Christian, and in the second parts of such terms as Westminster abbey and Atlantic ocean.
Finally, there are certain differences in punctuation. The English, as everyone knows, put a comma after the street number of a house, making it, for example, 34, St. James street. They usually insert a comma instead of a period after the hour when giving the time in figures, e. g., 9,27, and omit the 0 when indicating less than 10 minutes, e. g., 8,7 instead of 8.07. They do not use the period as the mark of the decimal, but employ a dot at the level of the upper dot of a colon, as in 3·1416. They cling to the hyphen in such words as to-day and to-night; it begins to disappear in America. They use an before hotel and historical; Kipling has even used it before hydraulic;[1] Amer- ican usage prefers a. But these small differences need not be pursued further.
- ↑ Now and then the English flirt with the American usage. Hart says, for example, that "originally the cover of the large Oxford Dictionary had ’a historical.’" But "an historical" now appears there.
