The interrobang is a symbol that combines the exclamation mark and question mark, intended to replace their written use together. It was conceived in the 1960s but has not become widely adopted due to its poor stylistic construction. However, it can still be found in some fonts and Unicode systems.
An interrobang is a rarely used symbol in English typography that combines the shapes of the exclamation mark and the question mark. It essentially looks like an exclamation mark with a question mark growing from about the midpoint of the straight line, with both marks sharing the same point, and the upper curve hook on the question mark just going past the top of the exclamation mark. The name interrobang comes from the Latin interrogatio, which is a type of interrogative question, and the slang term bang, used by printers and printers to refer to the exclamation point. Other names initially proposed included the rhet and the exclamation.
An interrobang is intended to replace the written use of an exclamation point and a question mark next to each other, as in the sentence “He said what?!” This type of training, and thus the use of the interrobang, is usually intended either to express disbelief or to convey a sense of excitement about the question being asked. The combination of a question mark and an exclamation point to end a sentence has been used in English for some time, not only in informal writing, but also in semi-formal situations such as news headlines. Formally, of course, it’s usually considered inappropriate to use more than one closing sign at the end of a sentence, and thus the interrogabang has no real place in formal writing.
The interrobang was conceived by an American publicist in the 1960s, Martin Speckter, who thought that the aesthetics of one typographic symbol would be better than two. The excited or surprised question was often used in advertising, but even after its creation, the interrobang was rarely used to replace the more common “?!” rope.
Despite some early successes and adoptions, such as its inclusion on a typewriter in the late 1960s, the interrobang has never caught on in the world at large. Typographic symbols are rarely adopted, so its failure to become a standard symbol is no surprise. The fact that the combination it represents is regarded by most people as a poor stylistic construction no doubt also played heavily on its failure. However, it is not quite dead; many new fonts include an interrupt; the Unicode system lists it as U+203D, and it can also be expressed in HTML, using the code ‽, rendering: ‽
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