A dot is a small, round mark or spot. When you put your pencil on paper and lift it right away, you've made a dot. Connect enough dots in the right order, and you can create a picture or trace a path.

Dots appear everywhere in writing and communication. The period at the end of this sentence is a dot. Morse code uses dots and dashes to spell out messages: three dots means the letter S. In music, a dot after a note tells you to hold that note longer. The two dots in a colon (:) help organize your writing.

The phrase on the dot means exactly on time. If your friend arrives at 3:00 on the dot, they show up at precisely three o'clock, not 3:01 or 2:59.

You might also hear people talk about connecting the dots, which means figuring out how separate pieces of information fit together to reveal a bigger picture. When a detective connects the dots between clues, she solves the mystery by seeing how everything relates.

As a verb, to dot means to mark something with dots, like dotting a page with tiny circles.

In technology, websites use dot com or dot org in their addresses. These dots separate different parts of a web address, like periods separate sentences in a paragraph.