In the Devanāgarī

Devanagari

Devanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...

 script

Writing system

A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...

, the danda (Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

  "stick") is a punctuation

Punctuation

Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences...

 character

Character (computing)

In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language....

. The glyph

Glyph

A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....

 consists of a single vertical stroke. The character can be found at code point

Character encoding

A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...

 U+0964 in Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

. The "double danda" is at U+0965 . ISCII

ISCII

Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange is a coding scheme for representing various writing systems of India. It encodes the main Indic scripts and a Roman transliteration. The supported scripts are: Assamese, Bengali , Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya , Tamil,...

 encodes danda at 0xEA.

The danda marks the end of a sentence or period, comparable to a full stop

Full stop

A full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...

 (period) as commonly used in the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

. In metrical texts, a double danda is used to delimit verses, and a single danda to delimit a pada

Pada

Pada may refer to:*Pada , in Sanskrit grammar, and Hindu and Buddhist tradition*Sri Pada or Adam's Peak, a mountain in Sri Lanka*Pada, Estonia, village in Viru-Nigula Parish, Lääne-Viru County, Estonia*Pada River, see List of rivers of Estonia...

 or semi-verse.

Etymology

The word literally means "stick, staff, rod, pole, cudgel, club", and is also used in the sense of "tusk", "trunk", "stalk, stem", or "handle".

As a unit of length, it corresponds to four hastas "hands". The term can also refer to a sceptre

Sceptre

A sceptre is a symbolic ornamental rod or wand borne in the hand by a ruling monarch as an item of royal or imperial insignia.-Antiquity:...

 as a symbol of power and sovereignty, and expresses "power over" in compounds, also on the sense of judicial authority and punishment (chastisement, imprisonment, etc.) and also including the sense "control, restraint, arrest, cessation" as in , , , etc.

It is also a slang for penis.