Period / Full Stop

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A Period (AmE) or Full Stop (BrE) is a punctuation‏‎ mark placed at the end of a sentence‏‎.

The symbol itself comes from Aristophanes of Byzantium who invented the system of punctuation where the height of placement of a dot on the line determined its meaning. A dot at the top indicated the end of a thought; a dot in the middle indicated the end of part of a complete thought and a dot at the bottom indicated the end of part of a thought. These are roughly equivalent to the period/full stop, semicolon‏‎ and comma.

The period of full stop is also used at the end of some abbreviations.

Finally 3 dots indicates a continuation, trailing off of thought, the written equivalent of speech trailing off into nothing:

I wonder if...