A term from Sanskrit, used in English. It is a punctuation mark, a short upright bar. The word literally means stick (and also has the sense of punishment).

In poetry it marks the caesura or mid-point of a line, and a double danda marks the end of the line.

In prose their use is more like sentence and paragraph breaks.

The middle consonants of the name are retroflex, written in print with dots under them, so it may also be seen on the Web as dan.d.a or daNDa. As it really ends in the h-sound visarga, usually omitted when Sanskrit names are taken into English, it may also be seen as dan.d.ah. or daNDaH.

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