The interrobang (), also known as the interabang
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.
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
Copywriting 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";
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 typeface for American Type Founders and included the interrobang as one of the characters.
In 1968, an interrobang key was available on some
Remington Rand . In the 1970s, replacement interrobang keycaps and
were available for some
Smith-Corona typewriters.
[ Smith-Corona flyer illustrating the Changeable Type system with an exclamation mark / interrobang unit Accessed March 7, 2009.]
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, the default font for many UI elements of legacy versions of Apple's
OS X operating system, includes the interrobang, and
Microsoft provides several versions of the interrobang in the
Wingdings character set (on the right bracket and tilde keys on US keyboard layouts), included with
Microsoft Office.
[ The Interrobang: A Twentieth Century Punctuation Mark. Accessed August 28, 2007.] It was accepted into
Unicode and is included in several fonts, including Lucida Sans Unicode, Arial Unicode MS, and
Calibri, the default font in the Office 2007, 2010, and 2013 suites.
[ MSDN fontblog . Accessed August 28, 2007.]
Upside-down interrobang
An upside-down interrobang (combining ¿ and ¡, Unicode character: ⸘), suitable for starting phrases in Spanish, Galician, and Asturian—which use inverted question and exclamation marks—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!?).
[RAE's Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas ] Older usage, still official but not widespread, recommended mixing the punctuation marks:
¡Verdad? or
¿Verdad!
Codepoint
The symbol is encoded in
Unicode's General Punctuation block at
codepoint . 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, in Australia, uses an interrobang as its logo,
as does the educational publishing company
Pearson PLC, which thus intends to convey "the excitement and fun of learning".
The logo of the National Endowment for the Humanities 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 2018 FCA 1328 (defamation proceedings between former Federal Opposition Leader Mark Latham and political campaigner and writer Osman Faruqi).
In chess, an interrobang is used to represent a dubious move, one that is questionable but possibly has merits.
See also
-
Irony mark (⸮)
-
Inverted question and exclamation marks (¿¡)
External links
