Text & writing
One or Two Spaces After a Period?
Many people were taught to put two spaces after a period, and many others were taught that one is correct. Both habits have a history. This guide explains where the two-space rule came from and what current style guides recommend.
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Where two spaces came from
Typewriters used monospaced type, where every character takes the same width. Typists added a second space after sentences to make the break between them easier to see. APA’s explanation of its current rule notes that typesetters never used two spaces; they used carefully adjusted wider spacing, and the two-space convention arose from the limitations of manual typewriters.
What style guides say today
- APA Style (7th edition) uses one space after end punctuation — a change from its 6th edition, which recommended two spaces in draft manuscripts.
- The Chicago Manual of Style uses one space between sentences.
- Modern typesetting and word-processing software handle the spacing between sentences for you, so one space is the norm in published text.
Does it matter?
In proportional fonts, a second space mostly just makes gaps uneven, and on the web, browsers collapse several ordinary spaces into one when displaying HTML. The practical reason to care is consistency: mixing one and two spaces looks untidy, and double spaces cause problems when text is searched or compared.
Converting double spaces
Collapsing every run of spaces into one space is the simplest way to switch a document from two spaces to one, and it fixes accidental double spaces between words at the same time.
One or Two Spaces After a Period FAQ
- Is it one or two spaces after a period?
- One, according to current major style guides including APA (7th edition) and Chicago.
- Why were people taught to use two spaces?
- Typewriters used monospaced type, and the extra space made sentence breaks easier to see.
- Did APA ever require two spaces?
- The 6th edition recommended two spaces after sentence-ending periods in drafts; the 7th edition changed to one space.
- Do web browsers show two spaces?
- When displaying HTML, browsers collapse runs of ordinary spaces into one, so a second space usually does not appear.
- How can I change two spaces to one throughout a document?
- Collapse every run of spaces into a single space with a find-and-replace or a tool that removes extra spaces.
Related guides
- Why Text Gets Extra SpacesThe usual causes of extra spaces — typing habits, justified PDF text, alignment with spaces, and non-breaking spaces from web pages — and why they matter.
- Spaces, Tabs, and Non-Breaking SpacesThe different space characters — ordinary spaces, tabs, non-breaking, narrow, em and zero-width spaces — with their code points and how each behaves.
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