Interrobang (‽)

The interrobang (‽) that fuses '?' and '!' into one mark for an astonished question (coined by advertising man Martin Speckter in 1962 and briefly sold as a real typewriter key) plus its Spanish-style opening twin, the inverted interrobang (⸘). Click any symbol to copy it instantly.

The interrobang (‽, Unicode U+203D) is a single glyph that fuses a question mark with an exclamation point, built to punctuate a sentence that asks and exclaims at once: "You did what‽" American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed it in 1962 in an article titled "Making a New Point, or, How About That…" in TYPEtalks, the magazine he edited; he built the name from interrogatio (Latin for a rhetorical question) and bang (printers' slang for the exclamation mark), passing over rejected candidates like "exclamaquest" and "exclarotive." It briefly became real hardware: Richard Isbell's 1965 Americana typeface included it, some Remington typewriters offered an interrobang key by 1968, and replacement keycaps reached Smith-Corona machines in the 1970s, but it never made it onto the standard keyboard and faded by the late 1970s. Unicode still encodes it, along with its mirror image, the inverted interrobang (⸘, U+2E18, added in Unicode 5.1 in 2008), designed to open a sentence the way ¿ and ¡ open questions and exclamations in Spanish. Don't confuse it with the reversed question mark (⸮), a separate 1575 rhetorical mark with its own page.

The Interrobang

The Interrobang: ‽ & ⸘

The mark itself and its mirror image: the standard interrobang that closes an astonished question, and the inverted form built to open one.

Interrobang (U+203D): Question + Exclamation in One Glyph
Inverted Interrobang (U+2E18): The Sentence-Opening Twin
What It Merges

The Question Mark and Exclamation Mark It Combines

The interrobang compresses these two everyday marks into one. When a keyboard can't produce it, people type the pair, or reach for Unicode's ready-made combined forms.

Question Mark (U+003F)
Exclamation Mark (U+0021)
Exclamation Question Mark (U+2049)
Question Exclamation Mark (U+2048)
Double Question Mark (U+2047)
Opening Punctuation

Why the Inverted Interrobang Exists

Spanish and related languages open a question with ¿ and an exclamation with ¡; the inverted interrobang ⸘ merges that opening pair, mirroring at the start of a sentence what ‽ does at the end. The reversed question mark ⸮ is a separate mark entirely. See its own page.

Inverted Question Mark (U+00BF)
Inverted Exclamation Mark (U+00A1)
Inverted Interrobang (U+2E18)
Reversed Question Mark (U+2E2E)

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Related Resources

Punctuation Symbols

The full reference set of everyday and specialty punctuation marks in Unicode, from dashes and brackets to novelty marks like the interrobang.

Backwards Question Mark (⸮)

A different historical rhetorical mark, the 1575 reversed question mark, not a question-plus-exclamation blend like the interrobang.

Em Dash (—)

Another punctuation mark with a vivid backstory and a family of look-alikes people constantly mix it up with.

Pilcrow (¶)

The paragraph mark: an editorial typography symbol with its own long print history.