Dot number
Dot 3 in braille
Dot 3 is the apostrophe. It is the one raised position out of the six a cell has.
Dot 3
Unicode ⠄ — U+2804, 1 dot on the left and nothing on the right
What this cell is
This cell has a single job, which is unusual: most of the sixty-three carry more than one.
| Reading | Kind | Where it applies |
|---|---|---|
| the apostrophe | Punctuation | By position |
Where you will meet it
The frequency list this site measures against is five thousand plain lowercase words, so it contains no example of this cell at all. These are written out instead, and rendered by the same translator as everything else here.
| Written | In braille |
|---|---|
| don't | |
| it's |
The same cell in the other codes
Braille is not one code. This site publishes five, and they do not put this cell to the same use. Text written with one table and read with another does not come out as an accent or two — it comes out as different words.
| Code | What this cell is |
|---|---|
| Unified English Braille | the apostrophe |
| Spanish braille | the marks . and ' (and 1 other sharing the cell) |
| Portuguese braille | the marks . and ' (and 1 other sharing the cell) |
| Arabic braille | the letter ء |
| Hindi braille | candrabindu |
In UEB this cell is the apostrophe. In Arabic, the letter ء. Spanish has seven letters outside a-z and Portuguese has thirteen, each a single cell where UEB spends three, and every one of them lands on a cell UEB had already given to something else. That is why the codes cannot be mixed, and it is the part no chart shows you.
One dot away
Under the fingers a missed or imagined dot turns this cell into 5 others. These are the ones to check against when a word will not resolve.
| Cell | Dots | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1-3 | the letter k; the word “knowledge” standing alone | |
| 2-3 | the letters bb between two letters; the prefix be- at the start of a word; the word “be” standing alone; the semicolon | |
| 3-4 | the letters st inside a word, and the word “still” alone | |
| 3-5 | the letters in inside a word; the word “in” standing alone | |
| 3-6 | the hyphen |
Look up something else
The braille dot numbers page takes any combination of the six, the decoder reads a whole passage back, and the chart runs the other way, from the letter to the dots.
Dot 3 as an image
The cell on its own: dot 3 filled, the other five positions shown empty — which is the part a description in words tends to leave out.
