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 mark itself and its mirror image: the standard interrobang that closes an astonished question, and the inverted form built to open one.
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.
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.
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Open UltraTextGen →The full reference set of everyday and specialty punctuation marks in Unicode, from dashes and brackets to novelty marks like the interrobang.
A different historical rhetorical mark — the 1575 reversed question mark, not a question-plus-exclamation blend like the interrobang.
Another punctuation mark with a vivid backstory and a family of look-alikes people constantly mix it up with.
The paragraph mark — an editorial typography symbol with its own long print history.