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### 25.2 Sentences

The Emacs commands for manipulating sentences and paragraphs are mostly on Meta keys, like the word-handling commands.

`M-a`

  Move back to the beginning of the sentence (`backward-sentence`).

`M-e`

  Move forward to the end of the sentence (`forward-sentence`).

`M-k`

  Kill forward to the end of the sentence (`kill-sentence`).

`C-x DEL`

  Kill back to the beginning of the sentence (`backward-kill-sentence`).

The commands `M-a` (`backward-sentence`) and `M-e` (`forward-sentence`) move to the beginning and end of the current sentence, respectively. Their bindings were chosen to resemble `C-a` and `C-e`, which move to the beginning and end of a line. Unlike them, `M-a` and `M-e` move over successive sentences if repeated.

Moving backward over a sentence places point just before the first character of the sentence; moving forward places point right after the punctuation that ends the sentence. Neither one moves over the whitespace at the sentence boundary.

Just as `C-a` and `C-e` have a kill command, `C-k`, to go with them, `M-a` and `M-e` have a corresponding kill command: `M-k` (`kill-sentence`) kills from point to the end of the sentence. With a positive numeric argument n, it kills the next n sentences; with a negative argument âˆ’n, it kills back to the beginning of the nth preceding sentence.

The `C-x DEL` (`backward-kill-sentence`) kills back to the beginning of a sentence.

The sentence commands assume that you follow the American typist’s convention of putting two spaces at the end of a sentence. That is, a sentence ends wherever there is a ‘`.`’, ‘`?`’ or ‘`!`’ followed by the end of a line or two spaces, with any number of ‘`)`’, ‘`]`’, ‘`'`’, or ‘`"`’ characters allowed in between. A sentence also begins or ends wherever a paragraph begins or ends. It is useful to follow this convention, because it allows the Emacs sentence commands to distinguish between periods that end a sentence and periods that indicate abbreviations.

If you want to use just one space between sentences, you can set the variable `sentence-end-double-space` to `nil` to make the sentence commands stop for single spaces. However, this has a drawback: there is no way to distinguish between periods that end sentences and those that indicate abbreviations. For convenient and reliable editing, we therefore recommend you follow the two-space convention. The variable `sentence-end-double-space` also affects filling (see Fill Commands).

The variable `sentence-end` controls how to recognize the end of a sentence. If non-`nil`, its value should be a regular expression, which is used to match the last few characters of a sentence, together with the whitespace following the sentence (see Regexps). If the value is `nil`, the default, then Emacs computes sentence ends according to various criteria such as the value of `sentence-end-double-space`.

Some languages, such as Thai, do not use periods to indicate the end of a sentence. Set the variable `sentence-end-without-period` to `t` in such cases.

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