Aclause,phrase orword which is inserted (usually for explanation or amplification) into apassage which is already grammatically complete, and usually marked off with brackets, commas or dashes.
There be five manner of points and divisions most used among cunning men; the which if they be well used, make the sentence very light and easy to be understood, both to the reader and hearer: and they be these,virgil,—come,—parenthesis,—plain point,—interrogative[…] it is a slender stroke leaning forward, betokening a little short rest, without any perfectness yet of sentence.
1842, F. Francillon,An Essay on Punctuation[1], page 9:
2018, James Lambert, “Anglo-Indian slang in dictionaries on historical principles”, inWorld Englishes, volume37, page255:
[T]he present research also made an effort to approach a greater accuracy in presenting the original sources of borrowed words. This was achieved by presenting etymons from Hindustani in the Devanagari script followed by a transliteration in the Roman alphabet inparentheses.
Mr. Trevanion was one of those talkers, who are too much engrossed with their own subject matter to have much attention to bestow elsewhere; with them silence is attention. Ethel's wandering eye, and lip, tremulous with its effort to speak, would never have attracted his notice. To his utter astonishment, she interrupted aparenthesis, as brilliant as the rocket which it depicted, by saying,— "Mr. Trevanion, I do not know what you will think of my boldness, but I must speak to you."
Ryan Bingham (George Clooney): I thought I was a part of your life. Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga): I thought we signed up for the same thing[…] I thought our relationship was perfectly clear. You are an escape. You're a break from our normal lives. You're aparenthesis. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney): I'm aparenthesis?
(mathematics,logic) Such brackets as used to clarify expressions by grouping those terms affected by a common operator, or to enclose thecomponents of avector or theelements of amatrix.
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