Bracketing

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The process of enclosing text within parentheses for clarity
2. A technique for grouping items to indicate their relationship or hierarchy in written form
3. The act of placing items or concepts within specified limits to clarify their context or correlation

Etymology: Bracket began life as a piece of clothing. Its ancestor was Latin "brāca", meaning "pants", a word borrowed from Gaulish, and Old French turned it into "braguette", the opening in the front of a pair of breeches. The sense of a support jutting out from a wall, which is where the building meaning comes from, came later and was a separate extension, not a direct descendant of the trouser sense. From there the word drifted from the body to the built environment and then to the page. A bracket was first a wedge or fitting that held two surfaces at an angle, and the modern typographic sense, the pair of marks enclosing a passage, followed from the idea of enclosing or grouping things together. Bracketing, then, is the act of enclosing items within such marks so their relationship is visible on the page.

Synonyms: enclosing, framing, surrounding, including, setting

Antonyms: excluding, removing, detaching, separating, disengaging