this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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The way I was taught growing up, brackets are [these]. Parenthesis are (these).
Yes, technically the latter are also brackets. But they can also be called parenthesis, whereas the former is exclusively a bracket. So we were taught to call them separate words to differentiate while doing equations.
I'm a theoretical physics grad student and a night school maths teacher, I have never heard this distinction. People in academia around me call them round and square brackets.
It's a US vs UK (and probably others) distinction. The ( ) are almost never called brackets in the US, unless it's a regional thing I'm not aware of. Also the [ ] didn't get used in any math classes I was in the US up through calculus except for matrices.
Interesting! Nobody at my institute is a native English speaker. They're from several European and some Asian and south American countries.
Yeah, but as an adult it depends entirely on whether you're in an industry or hobby that requires that level of bracket nuance/exponents.
Most of us are just trying to remember the basics.