bracket

brackets

an artillery firing term indicating firing short or over with respect to the target. When a shell falls (explodes) in front of the target (short), it is called a minus; when it goes beyond the target (over), it is called a plus. Firing with the purpose of destroying the target should not commence before a bracket is determined. For this reason, adjustment is made to determine the assured minimum bracket (two pluses and two minuses).

(1) One of a pair of punctuation marks consisting of two vertical strokes, either round, as with parentheses (), rectangular, as with square brackets [], or irregular in shape, as with braces {}. Brackets are used to isolate words, parts of sentences, or whole sentences that contain information and explanatory matter supplementary to the main part of a text. In Russian, diagonals / / are often used for this purpose, especially in typescript. One use of brackets is seen in the following: “Scholars of Middle Asia (Abu Nasr al-Farabi [tenth century] and Ibn Sina [Avicenna, tenth and 11th centuries]) made a great contribution to the development of music.” In linguistics, square brackets are used to indicate the phonetic transcription of a sound, and diagonals are used to indicate phonemes. In Russian, diagonals and angle brackets are used to designate ellipses in a shortened text.

(2) In mathematics, the marks (),[], and {} are used to indicate the order in which mathematical operations are performed.