There is a question and there is an exclamation. In English, there are special characters for both. For a question there is the question mark. Really? Yes. For an exclamation, there is the exclamation point. Of course! For the common situation when a question is said with excitement, there is something called the interrobang. What!?
The interrobang was invented back in 1962 by Martin K. Speckter. He worked in advertising, so instantly you can see where his head was when he thought of it.
The reason that the interrobang had to wade through 600 years of English to be invented is that it’s not really necessary. Grammarians explain that the single eclamation point is entirely sufficient to express an excited question or disbelief. Apparently that wasn’t enough for Madison Avenue.
On the Internet, you’ll see interrobangs used often in on-line forums and chat rooms. There is no official preference to the order; you’ll find both !? and ?! used interchangeably. What you probably won’t find, however, is the interrobang character, ‽.
What the…‽
Yes, thanks to Unicode, there is an interrobang character. The official Unicode value is U+203D. If you’re coding a web page and want to splash down a ‽, then you’ll need to know HTML code ‽.
For most of us on the PC planet, you’ll find it easiest to create an interrobang in Microsoft Word. Don’t look for it on your keyboard, of course; you’ll need to use the old Alt+NumPad keyboard trick to input the ‽ character properly. Here’s how it works:
- Ensure that Num Lock is on; press the Num Lock key otherwise.
- Press and hold down the Alt key. Keep it down!
- On the numeric keypad, type 8253. Yes, that’s the same code used in HTML (above).
- Release the Alt key
And the character appears!
Once in Word, you can copy and paste the interrobang onto a web page or other document. Because your PC uses Unicode, the character stays the same everywhere.
Really‽
Absolutely!
