The question mark (?), also known as an interrogation point, question point, query,^[1] or eroteme, is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence. It can also be used mid-sentence to mark a merely interrogative phrase, where it functions similarly to a comma, such as in the single sentence "Where shall we go? and what shall we do?", but this usage is increasingly rare. The question mark is not used for indirect questions. The question mark character is also often used in place of missing or unknown data. It can also be used in place of a period. ? , although most commonly referring to Question mark, may also refer to: A Lost episode. ... The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ... A full stop or period (sometimes stop, full point, decimal point, or dot), is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and many other languages. ... For other uses, see Comma. ... Look up period in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

History

Standard question mark

The symbol is sometimes ^[2] thought to originate from the Latin quaestiō (that is, qvaestio), meaning "question", which was abbreviated during the Middle Ages to Qo. The uppercase Q was written above the lowercase o, and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol. Scholars are now discorvering that the question mark may have been invented by Gill of Ilos, one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Image File history File links Question_mark. ... Image File history File links Question_mark. ... For other uses, see Latins and Latin (disambiguation). ... The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times, beginning with the Renaissance. ...

Another hypothesis about the origin of the question mark proposes that it originated in the 9th century, when it appeared as an exclamation point with a curved bar (like a tilde written slantwise) in order to reflect the intonation of the speaker.^{[citation needed]} Lynne Truss attributes an early form to Alcuin of York.^[3] Truss describes the punctus interrogativus of the late 700s as "a lightning flash, striking from right to left." The name "question mark" was coined in the late 1800s.^[4] As a means of recording the passage of time the 9th century was the century that lasted from 801 to 900. ... An exclamation mark (also exclamation point, and (rarely) mark of admiration) is a punctuation mark or, more pedantically, a tone mark. ... For the baseball player known as the Big Tilde, see Magglio Ordóñez. ... Flaccus Albinus Alcuin (about 735 - May 19, 804) was a monk from York, England. ...

Yet another view is that the question mark simply inverts the semicolon, which marked interrogative clauses in Ancient Greek (while enlarging the upper portion). A semicolon (  ;  ) is a punctuation mark. ... Beginning of Homers Odyssey The Ancient Greek language is the historical stage of the Greek language[1] as it existed during the Archaic (9th–6th centuries BC) and Classical (5th–4th centuries BC) periods in Ancient Greece. ...

The origin of the question mark has also been associated with early musical notation like neumes.^{[citation needed]} The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. ...

An American superstition that movies or television shows with question marks in the title do poorly at the box office has made many studios shy away from the punctuation mark. This has caused many works to be retitled when adapted for American cinema, such as the book Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, which was retitled Who Framed Roger Rabbit (without the question mark) for the big screen.^{[citation needed]} For other uses, see Superstition (disambiguation). ... This article is about motion pictures. ... A television program is the content of television broadcasting. ... The term box office can refer to either: A place where tickets are sold to the public for admission to a venue The amount of business a particular production, such as a movie or theatre show, does. ... Who Censored Roger Rabbit - First edition cover Who Censored Roger Rabbit? was a mystery novel written by Gary Wolf in 1981, later adapted into the hit Disney film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). ... Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a 1988 film produced by Amblin Entertainment and The Walt Disney Company (released on its Touchstone Pictures banner), which blends traditional animation and live action. ...

Proper placement

Spacing before the question mark

Some writers place a space between the end of their sentence and the question mark. This usage is thought to stem from French practice and is known as French spacing. In French a space is always placed before question marks and exclamation marks, as well as colons and semicolons (see Ponctuation at French Wikipedia). In English, however, the insertion of this space is generally considered bad form. The Oxford English Dictionary rules against it. Some English-language books do appear to have these spaces, but these are often a thin space or a hair space, which are not full spaces but merely a form of kerning used to make the text less cramped and thus easier to read. (For detailed discussion of spaces after a question mark, see Full stop.) This article is about a typographical convention used in English text. ... OED stands for Oxford English Dictionary Office of Enrollment & Discipline This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... A space is a punctuation convention for providing interword separation in some scripts, including the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic. ... A space is a punctuation convention for providing interword separation in some scripts, including the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... A full stop or period (sometimes stop, full point, decimal point, or dot), is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and many other languages. ...

Multiple question marks

Using multiple question marks at the end of a sentence is often considered improper (i.e. "What???"). If the need for urgency or illustration of higher confusion is needed, an exclamation point and a question mark should be used ("What!?").^[5]

Other languages

Opening (inverted) and closing question marks for Spanish-language questions

In some languages, such as Spanish and Galician, typography since the 18th century has required opening and closing question marks, as in "¿Qué hora es?" (What time is it?); an interrogative sentence or phrase begins with an inverted question mark (¿) and ends with the question mark (?). This orthographical rule is often disregarded in quick typing, although its omission is always considered a mistake. Image File history File links Question_opening-closing. ... Galician (Galician: galego, IPA: ) is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community with the constitutional status of historic nationality, located in northwestern Spain and small bordering zones in neighbouring autonomous communities of Asturias and Castilla y León. ... (17th century - 18th century - 19th century - more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701 through 1800. ... The inverted question mark and exclamation point are used to begin interrogative and exclamatory sentences, respectively, in written Spanish. ... The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. ... This article is about entering text. ...

Question mark in Armenian

In Greek and Church Slavonic, a semicolon (;) is used as a question mark. Image File history File links Harcakan. ... Page from the Spiridon Psalter in Church Slavic. ... A semicolon (  ;  ) is a punctuation mark. ...

In Armenian the question mark (՞ ) has a form of an open circle and is placed over the last vowel of the question word.

In Arabic, which is written from right to left, the question mark "؟" is mirrored right-to-left from the English question mark. (Some browsers may display the character in the previous sentence as a forward question mark due to font or text directionality issues.) Hebrew is also written right-to-left, but uses a question mark that appears on the page in the same orientation as the English "?".^[6] Arabic redirects here. ... Hebrew redirects here. ...

The question mark is also used in modern writing in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, though it is not required in Japanese. Usually it is written as fullwidth form (？; Unicode: U+FF1F) in Chinese and Japanese.
In CJK computing, graphic characters are traditionally classed into fullwidth (in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 全形; elsewhere: 全角) and halfwidth (in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 半形; elsewhere: 半角) characters. ... Unicode’s Universal Character Set potentially supports over 1 million (1,114,112 = 220 + 216 or 17 × 216, hexadecimal 110000) code points. ...

Rhetorical question mark

The rhetorical question mark was invented by Henry Denham in the 1580s and was used at the end of a rhetorical question; however, it died out of use in the 1600s. It was the reverse of an ordinary question mark, so that instead of the main opening pointing back into the sentence, it opened away from it.^[7] Denham was one of the outstanding printers of the sixteenth century. ... Events and Trends The beginnings of the Golden Age of Literature in England Sir Humphrey Gilbert claims Newfoundland as Englands first overseas colony in 1583 Francis Drake had come back from going around the world, bringing back with him many treasures. ... A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for rhetorical effect rather than to receive an answer. ...

Some have adapted the question mark into various irony marks, but these are very rarely seen. The irony mark (؟) (French: point d’ironie) is a punctuation mark that purports to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. ...

Computing

In computing, the question mark character is represented by ASCII code 63, and is located at Unicode code-point U+003F. The full-width (double-byte) equivalent, ？, is located at Unicode code point U+FF1F. For the formal concept of computation, see computation. ... Image:ASCII fullsvg There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ... The international standard ISO/IEC 10646 defines the Universal Character Set (UCS) as a character encoding. ...

The question mark is often utilized as a wildcard character: a symbol that can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in a string. In particular "?" is used as a substitute for any one character as opposed to the asterisk, "*", which can be used as a substitute for zero or more characters in a string. The inverted question mark corresponds to Unicode code-point 191 (U+00BF), and can be accessed from the keyboard in Microsoft Windows on the default US layout by pressing AltGr-/ or by holding down the Alt key and typing either 1 6 8 (ANSI) or 0 1 9 1 (Unicode) on the numeric keypad. In GNOME applications, it can be entered by typing the hexadecimal Unicode character while holding ctrl-shift, i.e.: ctrl-shift BF - ¿. In recent XFree86 and X.Org incarnations of the X Window System, it can be accessed as a compose sequence of two straight question marks, i.e. pressing <Compose> ? ? yields ¿. In the Mac OS, option-shift-? produces an inverted question mark. The term wildcard character has the following meanings: // In telecommunications, a wildcard character is a character that may be substituted for any of a defined subset of all possible characters. ... In computer programming and formal language theory, (and other branches of mathematics), a string is an ordered sequence of symbols. ... Windows redirects here. ... AltGr is a modifier key on PC keyboards used to type many characters, primarily ones that are unusual for the locale of the keyboard layout, such as foreign currency symbols and accented letters. ... The Alt key on a modern Windows keyboard The Alt key on an IBM PC keyboard is the key located immediately to either side of the Space bar, used to change (alternate) the function of other pressed keys. ... This article is about the mythical creature. ... “X11” redirects here. ... This article relates to both the original Classic Mac OS as well as Mac OS X, Apples more recent operating system. ...

The question mark is used in ASCII renderings of the International Phonetic Alphabet, such as SAMPA in place of the glottal stop symbol, ʔ, (which resembles "?" without the dot), and corresponds to Unicode code point U+0294, Latin letter glottal stop. Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

In computer programming, the symbol "?" has a special meaning in many programming languages. In C, "?" is part of the ?: operator, which is used to evaluate simple boolean conditions. In C# 2.0, the "?" modifier and the "??" operator are used to handle nullable data types. In the POSIX syntax for regular expressions, such as the one used in Perl and Python, ? stands for "zero or one instance of the previous subexpression", i.e. an optional element. Programming redirects here. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... POSIX or Portable Operating System Interface[1] is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API) for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system. ... In computing, a regular expression is a string that is used to describe or match a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules. ... Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Perl Programming Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. ... Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language. ...

In many web browsers, "?" is used to show a character not found in the program's character set. 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. Some fonts will instead use the Unicode Replacement Glyph (U+FFFD, �), which is commonly rendered as a white question mark in a black diamond. An example of a Web browser (Mozilla Firefox) A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network. ... A character encoding is a code that pairs a set of characters (such as an alphabet or syllabary) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses. ...

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: // Uniform Resource Locator (URL) formerly known as Universal Resource Locator, is a technical, Web-related term used in two distinct meanings: In popular usage and many technical documents, it is a synonym for Uniform Resource Identifier (URI); Strictly, the idea of a uniform syntax for global identifiers of network-retrievable... In the World Wide Web, a query string is the part of a URL that contains data to be passed to CGI programs. ... An ampersand (&), also commonly called an and sign is a logogram representing the conjunction and. ...

http://www.example.com/login.php?username=test&password=blank

Here, a script on the page login.php on the server www.example.com is to provide a response to the query string containing the pairs "username=test" and "password=blank".

Linguistics

In linguistics, the question mark is prepended to strings to show that the linguist cannot determine whether they are well-formed or not. It is used similarly to the asterisk, which marks strings that are clearly ill-formed. It may be doubled to show greater uncertainty, or combined with the asterisk to show that the string is most likely ill-formed but that there is room for doubt. For the journal, see Linguistics (journal). ... The term well-formed, when used by itself, can refer to: A formula in logic: see WFF The way in which an HTML tag has been used in web page design: see well-formed tag This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise... This article is about the typographical symbol. ...

Chess

In algebraic chess notation, "?" denotes a bad move, and "??" a blunder. For details see punctuation (chess). Chessboard notation Algebraic chess notation is used to record and describe the moves in a game of chess. ... When annotating chess-games, commentators frequently use question marks and exclamation points to denote a move as bad or good. ...

Mathematics

In mathematics "?" commonly denotes Minkowski's question mark function. For other meanings of mathematics or uses of math and maths, see Mathematics (disambiguation) and Math (disambiguation). ... Minkowski question mark function In mathematics, the Minkowski question mark function, sometimes called the slippery devils staircase, is a function, denoted ?(x), possessing various unusual fractal properties, defined by Hermann Minkowski in 1904. ...

Comics, cartoons and emoticons

In comic vignettes and strips, and in cartoons, the symbol "?" over a character's head denotes ignorance, doubt or the sudden surprise of the subject, and with the same meaning is used with emoticons. See comedian Stand up comedian List of Comedians List of British comedians comics comic book comic strip underground comics alternative comics web comic sprite comics manga graphic novel List of comic characters This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same... For other uses, see Cartoon (disambiguation). ... Emoticons originated with text representations. ...

The Batman villain Riddler wears a costume decorated with question marks--often a green leotard dotted with them, or perhaps a suit and a tie with a single question mark on it)--denoting his curious modus operandi. Batman (originally referred to as the Bat-Man and still referred to at times as the Batman) is a DC Comics fictional superhero who first appeared in Detective Comics #27 in May 1939. ... Bad guy redirects here. ... The Riddler, (Edward E. Nigma, also spelled Nygma by some writers), is a DC Comics supervillain and an enemy of Batman. ... For other uses, see Green (disambiguation). ... A leotard is a skin-tight one-piece garment that covers the torso and body but leaves the legs free. ... Modus operandi (often used in the abbreviated form MO) is a Latin phrase, approximately translated as mode of operation. ...

The DC hero Question (comics) often uses the question mark as a symbol and leaves notes with a "?" on them to show he was involved. The Question is an American comic book superhero. ...

See also

• Exclamation mark
• Interrobang

an exclamation mark An exclamation mark, exclamation point or bang, !, is usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feeling. ... For other uses, see Interrobang (disambiguation). ...

Notes

1. ^ In journalism. See Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003. p. 139. ISBN 1-592-40087-6.
2. ^ Brewer, E.C. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1870 (rev. 1894), s.v. 'Punctuation'.
3. ^ Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003. p. 76. ISBN 1-592-40087-6.
4. ^ Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003. p. 76. ISBN 1-592-40087-6.
5. ^ Effective use of email
6. ^ Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003. p. 143. ISBN 1-592-40087-6.
7. ^ Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003. p. 142. ISBN 1-592-40087-6.

References

External links

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Question mark

• The question mark and indirect questions
• What's the origin of the question mark?