・（中黒）

nakaguro
a traditional part of Japanese punctuation. can function as either a blank space, which is not usually used in Japanese writing, or as a slash/stroke mark

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a writing system that functions without spaces to separate words from one another presents a challenge. what do you do when importing foreign terms that naturally incorporate a space? such as 'New York' or 'ice cream'. in Chinese, of course, the space is jettisoned, and you see that sometimes in Japanese as well, but the most prevalent form used to be to simply insert a nakaguro, meaning, literally, centered black [dot], between the two (or more) imported words. Japanese imports a huge number of words every year into its language, generally using the katakana script, a phonetic syllabary, for that, although adopting foreign words has been going on since at least the eighth century CE, if not before, when Korean buddhist monks probably began introducing Buddhist texts in Chinese and the Japanese adapted the Chinese writing system, referred to as kanji, for their language.
when the Japanese were introduced to Dutch (via merchants) and Portuguese (via Jesuits) language concepts, in the sixteenth century CE, they originally either used new kanji compounds that sounded somewhat like the loan words, such as tobacco and pan (for bread), or developed new compounds that had no aural connection, like 天文学 (tenmongaku) for astronomy, etc.