When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the middle dot ·, or to the glyphs 'combining dot above' ̇ and 'combining dot below' ̣ which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in Eastern European languages and Vietnamese.

Example characters: ċ/Ċ from Maltese and Irish Gaelic (old orthography), ė/Ė from Lithuanian, ġ/Ġ from Maltese and Irish Gaelic (old orthography), ż/Ż from Polish, etc. In Irish Gaelic the dot is called a sí bualite.

In Vietnamese, the nặng (low, glottal) tone is repesented with a dot below the base vowel: ạ ặ ậ ẹ ệ ị ọ ộ ợ ụ ự ỵ. The dot above the lowercase i and j (and uppercase İ in Turkish) is not seen as a dot, but rather as part of the character, and the double dots above several Latin letters such as ä, ë etc. are not dots either, but are Umlauts or diaereses.

In romanizations of Semitic languages, a dot below a consonant is used to indicate the "emphatic version" of that consonant. E.g. ṣ represents emphatic s.

And in Yoruba, the dot is used below the o, the e and the s, those three letters can also occur without dot as another letter.