⸮ U+2E2E REVERSED QUESTION MARK — mirrored left-right, not the same move as ¿, which is rotated 180°. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
"Backwards question mark" usually means ⸮ (U+2E2E, REVERSED QUESTION MARK) — a plain "?" flipped left-right like a mirror image. English printer Henry Denham proposed it around 1575 as the punctus percontativus, a mark meant to close a rhetorical question and set it apart from a genuine one; it never caught on and mostly survives today as a curiosity and in linguistics notation for a sentence that's grammatically questionable rather than a real question. It's easy to confuse with two other marks that look similar but aren't the same transformation: ¿ (U+00BF, INVERTED QUESTION MARK) is rotated 180°, not mirrored — that's the mark Spanish and Catalan place at the start of a question, unrelated to Denham's proposal. And ؟ (U+061F, ARABIC QUESTION MARK) is mirrored like ⸮, but it isn't a novelty at all — it's simply the ordinary question mark in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, shaped to match those scripts' right-to-left direction.
Three marks that get lumped together as "backwards," and the different transformation each one actually is.
⸮ belongs to a small family of proposed-but-mostly-abandoned punctuation for tone that standard marks don't capture.
The everyday punctuation set ⸮ sits alongside once you're past the novelty marks.
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Another punctuation character with more regional variants than the keyboard shows.
For flipping a whole sentence, not just one mark — rotated, not mirrored, same distinction as ¿ vs ⸮.