The Question mark reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Question mark

Punctuation marks

; apostrophe ('), (’) ; brackets ((, )), ([, ]), ({, }), (〈, 〉) ; colon (:) ; comma (,) ; dash (‒), (–), (—), (―) ; ellipsis (...) ; exclamation marks (!, ¡) ; full stop (.) ; hyphen (-), (‐) ; interpunct (·) ; interrobang (‽) ; question marks (?, ¿) ; quotation marks ('), (‘, ’), ('), (“,”), ;     (‹, ›), («, »), (‚, ‘), („, “) ; semicolon (;) ; slash (/) ; space ( )

A question mark is a punctuation mark or, more pedantically, a tone mark. It is a full stop, like a period, used in interrogatory sentences, such as "Where did you get that hat?" In US English it is also called a query.

The symbol is generally thought to originate from the Latin quæstio, meaning question, which was abbreviated to 'Qo'. The capital 'Q' was written above the lowercase 'o', and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol.

There is another theory about the origin of the question mark. It may have originated from the 9th century, when it appeared as a point followed by the curvy bit written slanted, like '.~', although the ~ was tilted more upward to the right. The point has always indicated the end of a sentence. The curved line represented the intonation pattern of a spoken question, and may be associated with a kind of early musical notation.

In some languages, most notably Spanish, every question mark must be opened and closed; an interrogative sentence or phrase begins with an inverted question mark, "¿" and end with the familiar question mark "?". (The same is true of exclamation marks, "¡!".) However, this orthographical tradition is often disregarded in quick typing, especially in chat rooms and Internet forums.

The rhetorical question mark first appeared 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.

---

In computers, the question mark is represented as Unicode and ASCII character 63 or 0x003F. The inverted question mark corresponds to Unicode character 191 (0x00BF).

The question mark is used in ASCII renderings of the IPA, such as SAMPA in place of the glottal stop symbol (which resembles "?" without the dot, and corresponds to Unicode character U+0294 Latin letter glottal stop (ʔ).

In computer programming, the symbol "?" appears in several programming languages. In C it is part of the ?: operator, which is used for simple boolean conditions. 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.

---

For the rock music band, see ? & the Mysterians.

This is the "Question mark" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.