Scriptio continua

Scriptio continua (Latin for "continuous script"), also known as scriptura continua or scripta continua, is a style of writing without spaces or other marks between the words or sentences.

In the West, the oldest Greek and Latin inscriptions use word dividers; however, Classical Greek and late Classical Latin both employed scriptio continua as the norm. Before the advent of the codex (book), Latin and Greek script was written on scrolls. The reader would typically already have memorized the text through an instructor, had memorized where the breaks were, and the reader often read aloud, usually to an audience in a kind of reading performance, using the text as a cue sheet. Also, the role of a scribe was to simply record everything they heard in order to leave documentation. Because the free form of speech is so continuous, it would not have made sense to add inaudible spaces in manuscripts. Furthermore, it would have been a waste of a writing medium such as papyrus to enter unnecessary spaces. Later on in history, the use of writing changed and it became more beneficial to add the word dividers and punctuation. Organizing the text to make it more rapidly ingested (through punctuation) was not needed and eventually the current system of rapid silent reading for information replaced the older slower performance declaimed aloud for dramatic effect. Increasing numbers of European texts were written with spaces between words from around AD 1000 in northern Europe to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when all European texts were written with words separated. Scriptio continua was considered obsolete by the twelfth century.