In writing, a space () is a blank area devoid of content, serving to separate words, syllables, letters, numbers, and punctuation. Conventions for interword and intersentence spaces vary among languages, and in some cases the spacing rules are quite complex. In the classical period, Latin was written with interpuncts (centred dots) as word separators, but that practice was abandoned sometime around 200 CE in favour of scriptio continua, i.e., with the words running together without any word separators. In around 600–800 CE, blank spaces started being inserted between words in Latin, and that practice carried over to all languages using the Latin alphabet (including English and most other Western European languages).