 Until the 20th century , publishing houses and printers in many countries used additional space between sentences . There were exceptions to this traditional spacing method — some printers used spacing between sentences that was no wider than word spacing . This was French spacing — a term synonymous with single @-@ space sentence spacing until the late 20th century . With the introduction of the typewriter in the late 19th century , typists used two spaces between sentences to mimic the style used by traditional typesetters . While wide sentence spacing was phased out in the printing industry in the mid @-@ twentieth century , the practice continued on typewriters and later on computers . Perhaps because of this , many modern sources now incorrectly claim that wide spacing was created for the typewriter . 
