Parentheses

Also called round brackets or parens.

How to type it

( is the right ring finger with Shift; ) is the right pinky with Shift. Introduced in Lesson 25: Parentheses: ( ).

Common uses

• Parentheses set off an aside or extra detail from the rest of a sentence.
• U.S. phone numbers often put the area code in parentheses, as in (555) 123-4567.
• In arithmetic, parentheses show which part to calculate first.

Less common uses

• In most programming languages, parentheses follow a function name to call it, as in print(x).
• Lisp code is built almost entirely from nested parentheses.