Staccato [stakˈkaːto] (Italian for “detached”) is a form of musical articulation. In modern notation it signifies a note of shortened duration,[1][2] separated from the note that may follow by silence.[3] It has been described by theorists and appeared in music since at least 1676.[4]

Notation
In 20th-century music, a dot placed above or below a note indicates that it should be played staccato, and a wedge is used for the more emphatic staccatissimo. However, before 1850, dots, dashes,, and the dot a longer, lighter one. A number of signs came to be used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to discriminate more subtle nuances of staccato. These signs involve various combinations of dots, vertical and horizontal dashes, vertical and horizontal wedges, and the like, but attempts to standardize these signs have not generally been successful.[5] This does not, however, alter the rhythm of the music and the remainder of the time allotted for each staccato note is played as rest. The opposite musical articulation of staccato is legato, signifying long and continuous notes.

Playing staccato is the opposite of playing legato. A staccato passage for strings is by definition a bowed rather than a pizzicato technique, though pizzicato itself might be thought of as a kind of staccato effect. For example, Leroy Anderson’s Jazz Legato/Jazz Pizzicato. There is an intermediate articulation called either mezzo staccato or non-legato. By default, in the music notation program Sibelius, “staccatos shorten a note by 50%.”

Source: Staccato – Wikipedia