Middot

Middot is a term with multiple meanings in English-language usage. In Jewish contexts, middot (plural of middah) means character traits, dispositions, or measures that define a person’s ethical behavior. The concept is central to discussions of personal growth and moral formation in rabbinic literature and liturgy. Various lists describe desirable qualities such as humility, truthfulness, patience, and kindness, while warnings against arrogance, deceit, and anger are framed as deviations from proper middot. A well-known reference is middot harachamim, “the attributes of mercy,” drawn from Exodus 34:6–7, which has influenced Jewish ethics and liturgical recitation.

In typography and digital text, middot refers to the middle dot character, a small centered dot used as an interpunct or multiplication dot. The character is encoded in Unicode as U+00B7 and is commonly rendered as · in HTML. It serves as a punctuation mark in several languages to separate items in a list, to indicate syllable breaks in transliteration, or to denote multiplication in mathematical notation when a dot operator is preferred over a cross. In LaTeX, the math operator for multiplication is \cdot, which produces a similar centered dot.

Middot thus covers both a semantic field in ethics and a distinct typographic symbol, each with its own conventions and usages.