History
In the fifth century, Syriac Bible manuscripts used question markers, according to a 2011 theory by manuscript specialist Chip Coakley: he believes the ''zagwa elaya'' ("upper pair"), a vertical double dot over a word at the start of a sentence, indicates that the sentence is a question. From around 783, in '' Godescalc Evangelistary'', a mark described as "a lightning flash, striking from right to left" is attested. This mark is later called a . According to some paleographers, it may have indicated intonation, perhaps associated with early musical notation like neumes. Another theory, is that the "lightning flash" was originally a tilde orThe mark which you are to notice in this lesson is of this shape ?You see it is made by placing a little crooked mark over a period. ..The name of this mark is the ''Question Mark'', because it is always put after a question. Sometimes it is called by a longer and harder name. The long and hard name is the ''Interroga'tion Point''.
Scope
In English, the question mark typically occurs at the end of a sentence, where it replaces the full stop (period). However, the question mark may also occur at the end of a clause or phrase, where it replaces the comma : :''Is it good in form? style? meaning?'' or: :"Showing off for him, for all of them, not out of hubris—hubris? him? what did he have to be hubrid about?—but from mood and nervousness." — Stanley Elkin. This is quite common in Spanish, where the use of bracketing question marks explicitly indicates the scope of interrogation. :' ('In case you cannot go with them, would you like to go with us?') A question mark may also appear immediately after questionable data, such as dates: :''Genghis Khan (1162?–1227)''In other languages and scripts
Opening and closing question marks in Spanish
In Spanish, since the second edition of the ''Ortografía'' of the in 1754, interrogatives require both opening and closing question marks. An interrogative sentence, clause, or phrase begins with an inverted question mark and ends with the question mark , as in: :' – 'She asks me, "What time is it? Question marks must always be matched, but to mark uncertainty rather than actual interrogation omitting the opening one is allowed, although discouraged: :' is preferred in Spanish over ' The omission of the opening mark is common in informal writing, but is considered an error. The one exception is when the question mark is matched with an exclamation mark, as in: :' – 'Who do you think you are?!' (The order may also be reversed, opening with a question mark and closing with an exclamation mark.) Nonetheless, even here the recommends matching punctuation: :' The opening question mark in Unicode is .In other languages of Spain
Galician also uses the inverted opening question mark, though usually only in long sentences or in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous. Basque only uses the terminal question mark.Armenian question mark
In Armenian, the question mark is a diacritic that takes the form of an open circle and is placed over the last vowel of the question word. It is defined in Unicode at .Greek question mark
The Greek question mark ( el, ερωτηματικό, links=no, translit=erōtīmatikó) looks like . It appeared around the same time as the Latin one, in the 8th century. It was adopted by Church Slavonic and eventually settled on a form essentially similar to the Latin semicolon. In Unicode, it is separately encoded as , but the similarity is so great that the code point is normalised to , making the marks identical in practice. In Greek, the question mark is used even for indirect questions.Mirrored question mark in right-to-left scripts
In Arabic and other languages that use Arabic script such as Persian, Urdu and Uyghur (Arabic form), which are written from right to left, the question mark is mirrored right-to-left from the Latin question mark. In Unicode, two encodings are available: and . (Some browsers may display the character in the previous sentence as a forward question mark due to font or text directionality issues). In addition, the Thaana script inFullwidth question mark in East Asian languages
The question mark is also used in modern writing in Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Japanese. Usually it is written as fullwidth form in Chinese and Japanese, in Unicode: . Chinese and Japanese also have a spoken indicator of questions, 吗 (ma) and か (ka) respectively, which essentially function as a verbal question mark. Because of this, in Japanese use of the question mark is optional with か. Thus the same sentence could be written both いいですか?('May I?') or いいですか。(Still 'May I?'), but usually, the question mark is used.In other scripts
Some other scripts have a specific question mark: * * * , and *Stylistic variants
French usage should include a narrow non-breaking space before the question mark. (For example, ""), whereas in the English language orthography no space is allowed in front of the question mark (e.g. "What would you like to drink?").Typological variants of "?"
The rhetorical question mark or percontation point (seeComputing
In computing, the question mark?
is part of the ?:
operator, which is used to evaluate simple boolean conditions. In C# 2.0, the ?
modifier is used to handle nullable data types and ??
is the null coalescing operator. In the POSIX syntax for regular expressions, such as that used in Perl and Python, ?
stands for "zero or one instance of the previous subexpression", i.e. an optional element. It can also make a quantifier like
, +
or *
match as few characters as possible, making it lazy, e.g. /^.*?px/
will match the substring 165px
in 165px 17px
instead of matching 165px 17px
. In certain implementations of the BASIC programming language, the ?
character may be used as a shorthand for the "print" function; in others (notably the BBC BASIC family), ?
is used to address a single-byte memory location. In OCaml, the question mark precedes the label for an optional parameter. In ?
are used for predicates, such as odd?
, null?
, and eq?
. Similarly, in Ruby, method names ending in ?
are used for predicates. In Swift a type followed by ?
denotes an option type; ?
is also used in "optional chaining", where if an option value is nil, it ignores the following operations. Similarly, in Kotlin, a type followed by ?
is nullable and functions similar to option chaining are supported. In APL, ?
generates random numbers or a random subset of indices. In Rust, a ?
suffix on a function or method call indicates error handling. In SPARQL, the question mark is used to introduce variable names, such as ?name
. In MUMPS, it is the pattern match operator.
In many Web browsers and other computer programs, when converting text between encodings, it may not be possible to map some characters into the target character set. In this situation it is common to replace each unmappable character with a question mark ?, inverted question mark ¿, or the Unicode replacement character, usually rendered as a white question mark in a black diamond: . This commonly occurs for apostrophes and quotation marks when they are written with software that uses its own proprietary non-standard code for these characters, such as Microsoft Office's "smart quotes".
The generic URL syntax allows for a query string to be appended to a resource location in a Web address so that additional information can be passed to a script; the query mark, ?
, is used to indicate the start of a query string. A query string is usually made up of a number of different field/value pairs, each separated by the ampersand symbol, &
, as seen in this URL:
http://www.example.com/search.php?query=testing&database=English
Here, a script on the page search.php on the server www.example.com is to provide a response to the query string containing the pairs query=testing and database=English.
Games
In algebraic chess notation, someMathematics and formal logic
InMedicine
A question mark is used in English medical notes to suggest a possible diagnosis. It facilitates the recording of a doctor's impressions regarding a patient's symptoms and signs. For example, for a patient presenting with left lower abdominal pain, a differential diagnosis might include ''? diverticulitis'' (read as "query diverticulitis").See also
* Exclamation mark * High rising terminal ('upspeak', 'uptalk') * Interrobang *Notes
References
Bibliography
* *External links
* – provides an overview of question mark usage, and the differences between direct, indirect, and rhetorical questions. {{DEFAULTSORT:Question Mark Interrogative words and phrases Punctuation Typographical symbols