Interrobang
Encyclopedia
The interrobang, interabang (icon), (often represented by ), is a nonstandard punctuation
mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark
(also called the “interrogative point”) and the exclamation mark or exclamation point (known in printers’ jargon as the “bang”). The glyph
is a superimposition of these two marks. The Unicode
code point is U+203D.
ending with an interrobang asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question.
For example:
In informal English, the same inflection is usually notated by ending a sentence with first a question mark and then an exclamation mark.
, New South Wales, Australia, uses an interrobang as its logo.
Many writers, especially in informal writing, have used multiple punctuation marks to end a sentence expressing surprise and question.
The question mark frequently comes first, although there is no universal style rule on the subject.
Writers using informal language may use several question marks and exclamation marks for even more emphasis:
Like multiple exclamation marks and multiple question marks, such strings are poor style in formal writing.
Writers had combined question marks and exclamation marks (along with using multiple punctuation marks) for decades before the "invention" of the interrobang. They were prevalent in informal media such as print advertisements
and comic books.
They also occur in algebraic chess notation
, with "?!" identifying an interesting move that may not be the best, and "!?" labeling an unexpected move that turns out to be good. In algebraic chess notation, a "?" identifies a dubious move, while a "!" means a very good move. As in other writing, "?" and "!" may be multiplied. So long as only question or exclamation marks are used, this is acceptable notation.
conceptualized the interrobang in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency
, Speckter believed that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical question
s 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 rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest, but he settled on interrobang. He chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it: interrogatio is Latin
for "a 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.
In 1966, Richard Isbell of American Type Founders
issued the Americana typeface and included the interrobang as one of the characters. In 1968, an interrobang key was available on some Remington
typewriter
s. During the 1970s, it was possible to buy replacement interrobang keycaps and typefaces for some Smith-Corona typewriters. The interrobang was in vogue for much of the 1960s, with the word interrobang appearing in some dictionaries
and the mark itself being featured in magazine and newspaper articles.
The interrobang failed to amount to much more than a fad, however. It has not become a standard punctuation mark. Although most fonts do not include the interrobang, it has not disappeared: Microsoft
provides several versions of the interrobang character as part of the Wingdings 2 character set (on the right bracket and tilde
keys) available with Microsoft Office
. It was accepted into Unicode
and is present in several fonts, including Lucida Sans Unicode
, Arial Unicode MS
, and Calibri
, the default font in the Office 2007 suite.
s or fonts include a glyph
for the interrobang character. It is at Unicode
code point .
The interrobang can be used in some word processors with the alt code ALT+8253 when working in a font that supports the interrobang, or using an operating system
that performs font substitution
.
Depending on the browser and which fonts the user has installed, some of these may or may not be displayed or may be substituted with a different font.
On a Linux
system supporting the Compose Key
, an interrobang can be produced by pressing the compose key followed by the question mark and the exclamation mark in either order.
The interrobang can be displayed in LaTeX
by using the package textcomp and the command \textinterrobang. The inverted interrobang is also provided for in the textcomp package through the command \textinterrobangdown.
and Asturian
is called by some a gnaborretni (interrobang written backwards). Unicode
encodes this character at the code point . In current practice, interrobang-like emphatic ambiguity in Hispanic languages is usually achieved by including both sets of punctuation marks one inside the other (¿¡Verdad!? or ¡¿Verdad?! [Really!?]). Older usage, still official but not widespread, recommended mixing the punctuation marks: ¡Verdad? or ¿Verdad!
Punctuation
Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences...
mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark
Question mark
The question mark , is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence in English and many other languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions...
(also called the “interrogative point”) and the exclamation mark or exclamation point (known in printers’ jargon as the “bang”). The glyph
Glyph
A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
is a superimposition of these two marks. The Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
code point is U+203D.
Application
A sentenceSentence (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
ending with an interrobang asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question.
For example:
- You did what
- You're pregnant
In informal English, the same inflection is usually notated by ending a sentence with first a question mark and then an exclamation mark.
As a logo
The State Library of New South WalesState Library of New South Wales
The State Library of New South Wales is a large public library owned by the state of New South Wales, Australia. It is located in Macquarie Street, Sydney near Shakespeare Place...
, New South Wales, Australia, uses an interrobang as its logo.
History
What the...?! Neves, Called Dead in Fall, Denies It (headline from San Francisco Examiner, May 9, 1936)
The question mark frequently comes first, although there is no universal style rule on the subject.
Writers using informal language may use several question marks and exclamation marks for even more emphasis:
He did what?!?!?!
Like multiple exclamation marks and multiple question marks, such strings are poor style in formal writing.
Writers had combined question marks and exclamation marks (along with using multiple punctuation marks) for decades before the "invention" of the interrobang. They were prevalent in informal media such as print advertisements
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
and comic books.
They also occur in algebraic chess notation
Algebraic chess notation
Algebraic notation is a method for recording and describing the moves in a game of chess. It is now standard among all chess organizations and most books, magazines, and newspapers...
, with "?!" identifying an interesting move that may not be the best, and "!?" labeling an unexpected move that turns out to be good. In algebraic chess notation, a "?" identifies a dubious move, while a "!" means a very good move. As in other writing, "?" and "!" may be multiplied. So long as only question or exclamation marks are used, this is acceptable notation.
Invention
American Martin K. SpeckterMartin K. Speckter
Martin Speckter is the inventor of the interrobang , a punctuation mark that combines the uses of the exclamation point and the question mark. As the head of an advertising firm, Speckter looked for ways to merge the two symbols into one convenient mark. However, the interrobang never quite...
conceptualized the interrobang in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
, Speckter believed that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical question
Rhetorical question
A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply. Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to think about what the answer to the question must be. When a speaker states, "How much longer must our people...
s 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 rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest, but he settled on interrobang. He chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it: interrogatio is Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
for "a rhetorical question
Rhetorical question
A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply. Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to think about what the answer to the question must be. When a speaker states, "How much longer must our people...
" or "cross-examination
Cross-examination
In law, cross-examination is the interrogation of a witness called by one's opponent. It is preceded by direct examination and may be followed by a redirect .- Variations by Jurisdiction :In...
"; bang is printers
Printer (publisher)
In publishing, printers are both companies providing printing services and individuals who directly operate printing presses. With the invention of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450, printing—and printers—proliferated throughout Europe.Today, printers are found...
' slang for the exclamation mark. Graphic treatments
Graphic design
Graphic design is a creative process – most often involving a client and a designer and usually completed in conjunction with producers of form – undertaken in order to convey a specific message to a targeted audience...
for the new mark were also submitted in response to the article.
In 1966, Richard Isbell of American Type Founders
American Type Founders
American Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...
issued the Americana typeface and included the interrobang as one of the characters. In 1968, an interrobang key was available on some Remington
Remington
- People :* Eliphalet Remington , American firearms designer* Philo Remington , American firearms and typewriter manufacturer, son of Eliphalet Remington* Frederic Remington , American painter and sculptor...
typewriter
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
s. During the 1970s, it was possible to buy replacement interrobang keycaps and typefaces for some Smith-Corona typewriters. The interrobang was in vogue for much of the 1960s, with the word interrobang appearing in some dictionaries
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...
and the mark itself being featured in magazine and newspaper articles.
The interrobang failed to amount to much more than a fad, however. It has not become a standard punctuation mark. Although most fonts do not include the interrobang, it has not disappeared: Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
provides several versions of the interrobang character as part of the Wingdings 2 character set (on the right bracket and tilde
Tilde
The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics....
keys) available with Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
. It was accepted into Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
and is present in several fonts, including Lucida Sans Unicode
Lucida Sans Unicode
In digital typography, Lucida Sans Unicode OpenType font from the design studio of Bigelow & Holmes is designed to support the most commonly used characters defined in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard...
, Arial Unicode MS
Arial Unicode MS
In digital typography, the TrueType font Arial Unicode MS is an 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 code pages, but also requiring much...
, and Calibri
Calibri
Calibri is a humanist sans-serif typeface family under the Microsoft ClearType Font Collection.In Microsoft Office 2007, it replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Word and replaced Arial as the default in PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and WordPad...
, the default font in the Office 2007 suite.
Entering and display
The interrobang is not a standard punctuation mark. Few modern typefaceTypeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
s or fonts include a glyph
Glyph
A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
for the interrobang character. It is at Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
code point .
The interrobang can be used in some word processors with the alt code ALT+8253 when working in a font that supports the interrobang, or using an operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
that performs font substitution
Font substitution
Font substitution is the process of using one font in place of another when the intended font either is not available or does not contain glyphs for the required characters.Font substitution can be aided by:...
.
Depending on the browser and which fonts the user has installed, some of these may or may not be displayed or may be substituted with a different font.
| Image | Default font | Fixed Fixed (typeface) misc-fixed is a collection of monospace bitmap fonts that is distributed with the X Window System. It is a set of independent bitmap fonts which—apart from all being sans-serif fonts—cannot be described as belonging to a single font family. The misc-fixed fonts were the first fonts available for... |
Palatino Linotype | Calibri Calibri Calibri is a humanist sans-serif typeface family under the Microsoft ClearType Font Collection.In Microsoft Office 2007, it replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Word and replaced Arial as the default in PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and WordPad... |
Arial Unicode MS Arial Unicode MS In digital typography, the TrueType font Arial Unicode MS is an 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 code pages, but also requiring much... |
Code2000 Code2000 Code2000 is a pan-Unicode digital font, which includes characters and symbols from a very large range of writing systems. As of the current final version 1.171 released in 2008, Code2000 is designed and implemented by James Kass to include as much of the Unicode 5.2 standard as practical , and to... |
Helvetica Helvetica Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann.-Visual distinctive characteristics:Characteristics of this typeface are:lower case:square dot over the letter i.... |
Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... * |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
‽ | ‽ | ‽ | ‽ | ‽ | ‽ | ‽ | |
| *The Unicode column uses one of a selection of wide coverage Unicode fonts depending on what is installed on your system | ||||||||
On a Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
system supporting the Compose Key
Compose key
A compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
, an interrobang can be produced by pressing the compose key followed by the question mark and the exclamation mark in either order.
The interrobang can be displayed in LaTeX
LaTeX
LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
by using the package textcomp and the command \textinterrobang. The inverted interrobang is also provided for in the textcomp package through the command \textinterrobangdown.
Inverted interrobang
A reverse and upside down interrobang (combining ¿ and ¡, Unicode character: ), suitable for starting phrases in Spanish, GalicianGalician language
Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...
and Asturian
Asturian language
Asturian is a Romance language of the West Iberian group, Astur-Leonese Subgroup, spoken in the Spanish Region of Asturias by the Asturian people...
is called by some a gnaborretni (interrobang written backwards). Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
encodes this character at the code point . In current practice, interrobang-like emphatic ambiguity in Hispanic languages is usually achieved by including both sets of punctuation marks one inside the other (¿¡Verdad!? or ¡¿Verdad?! [Really!?]). Older usage, still official but not widespread, recommended mixing the punctuation marks: ¡Verdad? or ¿Verdad!
See also
- Irony markIrony markAlthough in the written English language there is no standard way to denote irony or sarcasm, several forms of punctuation have been proposed. Among the oldest and frequently attested are the percontation point invented by English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s, and the irony mark, furthered by...
(؟) - Inverted question and exclamation marks (¿¡)
- The State Library of New South WalesState Library of New South WalesThe State Library of New South Wales is a large public library owned by the state of New South Wales, Australia. It is located in Macquarie Street, Sydney near Shakespeare Place...
, which uses an interrobang as its logo