You Don’t See That Every Day: The Interrobang

Punctuation gives innumerable ways of expressing feelings, putting across points, enhancing messages, and drawing pretty pictures (for the sufficiently driven, or who think MS Paint is just a little too modern and polished).

There are some complex thoughts, however, that are just complex enough for more than one mark to express, such as the surprise and querying exhibited by the following sentence:

The exclamation point (the bang) preceded by the interrogative point (or the question mark). Why not combine them?

That might be what the American ad man Martin K. Speckter (d. 1988) thought. The result is what we type freaks call the interrobang, a portmanteau crafted from the names of the two marks (and a darn fun word to say, besides).

Speckter invented the interrobang in 1962, writing about it in TypeTALKS magazine and soliciting suggestions for its name from readers. It enjoyed some popularity but never caught on with the general public, but with the advent of Unicode there is some promise that it will be made available to the enlightened typophile (its Unicode tag is U+230D).

Despite its seeming obscurity, it is available it Microsoft Office users in the Wingdings 2 symbol font.