The interrobang (), also known as the interabang (sometimes rendered as ?!, !?, ?!?, ?!!, !??, or !?!), is an unconventional

punctuation mark Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisti ...

intended to combine the functions of the

question mark The question mark (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation, punctuation mark that indicates a question or interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. History The history of the question mark is ...

(also known as the interrogative point) and the

exclamation mark The exclamation mark (also known as exclamation point in American English) is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or to show wikt:emphasis, emphasis. The exclamation mark often marks ...

(also known in the jargon of printers and programmers as a "bang"). The glyph is a

ligature Ligature may refer to: Language * Ligature (writing), a combination of two or more letters into a single symbol (typography and calligraphy) * Ligature (grammar), a morpheme that links two words Medicine * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture us ...

of these two marks and was first proposed in 1962 by Martin K. Speckter.

Application

A sentence ending with an interrobang states a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement, disbelief, or confusion in the form of a question, or asks a

rhetorical question A rhetorical question is a question asked for a purpose other than to obtain information. In many cases it may be intended to start a discourse, as a means of displaying or emphasizing the speaker's or author's opinion on a topic. A simple example ...

. For example: * You call that a hat‽ * Are you ''out of your mind''‽ * Your dog ate what‽ * Are you a dummy‽ Writers using informal language may use several alternating question marks and exclamation marks for even more emphasis. However, this is regarded as poor style in formal writing.

History

Historically, writers have used multiple consecutive punctuation marks to end a sentence expressing both surprise and question.

Invention

American Martin K. Speckter (June 14, 1915 – February 14, 1988) conceptualized the interrobang in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency, Speckter believed that advertisements would look better if

copywriters Copywriting is the act or occupation of writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing. Copywriting is aimed at selling products or services. The product, called copy or sales copy, is written content that aims to increa ...

conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark. He proposed the concept of a single punctuation mark in an article in the magazine ''TYPEtalks''. Speckter solicited possible names for the new character from readers. Contenders included ''exclamaquest'', and ''exclarotive'', but he settled on ''interrobang''. He chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it: ''interrogatio'' is Latin for "rhetorical question" or "cross-examination"; ''bang'' is printers' slang for the exclamation mark. Graphic treatments for the new mark were also submitted in response to the article.

Early interest

In 1965, Richard Isbell created the

Americana Americana may refer to: *Americana music, a genre or style of American music * Americana (culture), artifacts of the culture of the United States Film, radio and television * ''Americana'' (1981 film), an American drama film * ''Americana'' (20 ...

typeface for

American Type Founders American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85 percent of all type manufactured in the United States at the time. De Vinne, Theodore Low, ''The Practice of Typogr ...

and included the interrobang as one of the characters. In 1968, an interrobang key was available on some Remington

typewriter A typewriter is a Machine, mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of Button (control), keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an i ...

s. In the 1970s, replacement interrobang keycaps and

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

s were available for some

Smith-Corona Smith Corona is an American manufacturer of thermal labels, direct thermal labels, and thermal ribbons used in warehouses for primarily barcode labels. Once a large U.S. typewriter and mechanical calculator manufacturer, Smith Corona expanded a ...

typewriters. The interrobang was in vogue for much of the 1960s; the word ''interrobang'' appeared in some dictionaries, and the mark was used in magazine and newspaper articles.

Continued support

Most fonts do not include the interrobang, but it has not disappeared.

Lucida Grande Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It is a member of the Lucida family of typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It is best known for its implementation throughout the macOS user interface from 1999 to 2014, a ...

, the default font for many UI elements of legacy versions of

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

operating system, includes the interrobang, and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

provides several versions of the interrobang in the Wingdings 2 character set (on the right bracket and tilde keys on US keyboard layouts), included with

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

. It was accepted into

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

and is included in several fonts, including

Lucida Sans Unicode Lucida Sans Unicode is an OpenType typeface from the design studio of Bigelow & Holmes,All Bigelow & Holmes Lucida typefaces are distributed by the designers througThe Lucida Fonts Storeand a subset of Lucida fonts is distributed bAscender Corpo ...

Arial Unicode MS Arial Unicode MS is a TrueType font and the extended version of the font Arial. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus supporting most Microsoft ...

, and

Calibri Calibri () is a digital sans-serif typeface family in the humanist or modern style. It was designed by Luc(as) de Groot in 2002–2004 and released to the general public in 2006, with Windows Vista. In Microsoft Office 2007, it replaced Time ...

, the default font in the

Office 2007 Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on Novemb ...

2010 The year saw a multitude of natural and environmental disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the 2010 Chile earthquake. The 2009 swine flu pandemic, swine flu pandemic which began the previous year ...

, and

2013 2013 was the first year since 1987 to contain four unique digits (a span of 26 years). 2013 was designated as: *International Year of Water Cooperation *International Year of Quinoa Events January * January 5 – 2013 Craig, Alask ...

suites.

Upside-down interrobang

An upside-down interrobang (combining ¿ and ¡, Unicode character: ⸘), suitable for starting phrases in

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

, Galician, and Asturian—which use

inverted question and exclamation marks The upside-down (also inverted, turned or rotated) question mark and exclamation mark are punctuation marks used to begin interrogative and exclamatory sentences or clauses in Spanish and some languages that have cultural ties with Spain, su ...

—is called an "inverted interrobang" or, rarely, a ''gnaborretni'' (''interrobang'' spelled backwards). In current practice, interrobang-like emphatic ambiguity in Hispanic languages is usually achieved by including both sets of punctuation marks one inside the other (''¿¡De verdad!?'' or ''¡¿De verdad?!'' 'Really!?''. Older usage, still official but not widespread, recommended mixing the punctuation marks: ''¡Verdad?'' or ''¿Verdad!''

Codepoint

The symbol is encoded in

General Punctuation General Punctuation is a Unicode block containing punctuation, spacing, and formatting characters for use with all scripts and writing systems. Included are the defined-width spaces, joining formats, directional formats, smart quotes, archaic ...

block at

codepoint A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dimensional (sheets in ...

. The inverted interrobang is at codepoint . Single-character versions of the double-glyph versions are also available at codepoints and .

Examples of use

The

State Library of New South Wales The State Library of New South Wales, part of which is known as the Mitchell Library, is a large heritage-listed special collections, reference and research library open to the public and is one of the oldest libraries in Australia. Establis ...

, in Australia, uses an interrobang as its logo, as does the educational publishing company Pearson, which thus intends to convey "the excitement and fun of learning". The logo of the

National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

incorporates eight exclamation marks and eight question marks; although their main strokes are separate, they all share the same dot, as in some variants of interrobangs. Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook used an interrobang in the 2012 United States Seventh Circuit opinion ''Robert F. Booth Trust v. Crowley''. Australian Federal Court Justice Michael Wigney used an interrobang in the first paragraph of his 2018 judgment in ''Faruqi v Latham

018 018 may refer to: *Air Canada Flight 018, an airline flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver, Canada, illegally boarded by a Chinese man wearing a disguise in 2010 *Area code 018, a telephone area code in Uppsala, Sweden *BMW 018, an experimental turboj ...

FCA 1328'' (defamation proceedings between former Federal Opposition Leader Mark Latham and political campaigner and writer Osman Faruqi). In

chess Chess is a board game for two players. It is an abstract strategy game that involves Perfect information, no hidden information and no elements of game of chance, chance. It is played on a square chessboard, board consisting of 64 squares arran ...

, an interrobang is used to represent a dubious move, one that is questionable but possibly has merits. (See also the evaluation symbols ?! (dubious move) and !? (interesting move).)

References

External links

{{navbox punctuation category:1960s neologisms category:Latin-script ligatures category:punctuation category:symbols introduced in 1962 category:typographical symbols