Parentheses
Various terms redirect here. For other uses, see parenthesis (disambiguation), paren (disambiguation), parenthetical referencing, Parens (moth), ( ) (disambiguation), and Parenthetical Girls.
Due to technical restrictions, titles like :) redirect here. For typographical portrayals of faces, see emoticon.
Look up parenthesis or ( ) in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Usage in writing
Parentheses /pəˈrɛnθɪsi:z/ (singular, parenthesis /pəˈrɛnθɪsɪs/) (also called simply brackets, or round brackets, curves, curved brackets, oval brackets, stalls or, colloquially, parens /pəˈrɛnz/) contain material that serves to clarify (in the manner of a gloss) or is aside from the main point.[9] A milder effect may be obtained by using a pair of commas as the delimiter, though if the sentence contains commas for other purposes, visual confusion may result. That issue is fixed by using a pair of dashes instead, to bracket the parenthetical.

In American usage, parentheses are usually considered separate from other brackets, and calling them "brackets" is unusual.

Parentheses may be used in formal writing to add supplementary information, such as "Sen. John McCain (R - Arizona) spoke at length". They can also indicate shorthand for "either singular or plural" for nouns, e.g. "the claim(s)". It can also be used for gender neutral language, especially in languages with grammatical gender, e.g. "(s)he agreed with his/her physician" (the slash in the second instance, as one alternative is replacing the other, not adding to it).[10]

Parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in informal writing and stream of consciousness literature. Examples include the southern American author William Faulkner (see Absalom, Absalom! and the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury) as well as poet E. E. Cummings.

Parentheses have historically been used where the dash is currently used in alternatives, such as "parenthesis)(parentheses". Examples of this usage can be seen in editions of Fowler's.

Parentheses may be nested (generally with one set (such as this) inside another set). This is not commonly used in formal writing (though sometimes other brackets [especially square brackets] will be used for one or more inner set of parentheses [in other words, secondary {or even tertiary} phrases can be found within the main parenthetical sentence]).

Any punctuation inside parentheses or other brackets is independent of the rest of the text: "Mrs. Pennyfarthing (What? Yes, that was her name!) was my landlady." In this usage, the explanatory text in the parentheses is a parenthesis. Parenthesized text is usually short and within a single sentence. Where several sentences of supplemental material are used in parentheses the final full stop would be within the parentheses, or simply omitted. Again, the parenthesis implies that the meaning and flow of the text is supplemental to the rest of the text and the whole would be unchanged were the parenthesized sentences removed.

In more formal usage, "parenthesis" may refer to the entire bracketed text, not just to the punctuation marks used (so all the text in this set of round brackets may be said to be "a parenthesis", "a parenthetical", or "a parenthetical phrase").[11]