?
See also: Appendix:Variations of "?"
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Translingual
Text style | Emoji style |
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❓︎ | ❓️ |
Note: Character's appearance may be different on each system. Text style is forced with ︎ and emoji style with ️ |
Text style | Emoji style |
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❔︎ | ❔️ |
Note: Character's appearance may be different on each system. Text style is forced with ︎ and emoji style with ️ |
Etymology
? may derive from Qo, with the Q written over the o, an abbreviation of Latin quaestio (“question”), placed at the end of a question to mark it as such.[1]
Punctuation mark
? (English name question mark)
- Used in various left-to-right scripts, including notably the Latin script, to mark the preceding sentence as a question.
- (comics, Internet slang) Used by itself to convey that the speaker is confused.
- Character #1: "I have no time to explain! Have you seen a Big Bad Wolf blowing down various houses?"
- Character #2: "?"
- (linguistics) Marks the following word or phrase as questionable for a grammatical or semantic-pragmatic reason.
- 2006, Renaat Declerck, Susan Reed, Bert Cappelle, “The Grammar of the English Verb Phrase”, in The Grammar of the English Tense System, volume 1 (in English), →ISBN, page 6:
- A superscript question mark will be used similarly to indicate that a sentence or constituent is questionable for a grammatical or semantic-pragmatic reason. A double superscript question mark indicates an even higher degree of questionability.
I have never { worked / ?been working } on a dissertation
This time tomorrow I { will / ??am going to } be driving to London.
See also
- For the reversed question mark used in some right-to-left scripts, such as the Arabic script, see ؟.
Symbol
?
- A placeholder for an unknown word, phrase, text, or numerical value.
- 2009, Terry Stickels, Math Puzzles and Brainteasers, Grades 3-5: Over 300 Puzzles that Teach Math and Problem-Solving Skills (in English), John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 6:
- What is the next number in the sequence below?
1 4 9 16 25 36 ?
- (chess) In algebraic notation, marking a bad move.
- (programming) A wildcard for one character in query language.
- (programming) The ternary operator in some programming languages.
- (regular expressions) Detects zero or one occurrences of the preceding element.
- The string
colou?r
matches both "color" and "colour".
- The string
- (networking) In a URL, begins a query string (a series of data formatted as field-value pairs).
Usage notes
- Its English name is variously question mark, interrogation mark, interrogation point, eroteme.
Quotations
For quotations using this term, see Citations:?.
Derived terms
See also
- apostrophe ( ' ) ( ’ )
- curly brackets or braces (US) ( { } )
- square brackets or brackets (US) ( [ ] )
- colon ( : )
- comma ( , )
- dashes ( ‒ ) ( – ) ( — ) ( ― )
- ellipsis ( … )
- exclamation mark ( ! )
- fraction slash ( ⁄ )
- guillemets ( « » ) ( ‹ › )
- hyphen ( - ) ( ‐ )
- interpunct ( · )
- interrobang (rare) ( ‽ )
- brackets or parentheses (US, Canada) ( ( ) )
- full stop or period (US, Canada) ( . )
- question mark ( ? )
- quotation marks (formal) ( ‘ ’ ‚ ) ( “ ” „ )
- quotation marks (informal, computing) ( " ) ( ' )
- semicolon ( ; )
- slash or stroke (UK) ( / )
- space ( ] [ )
References
- Alexander Humez, 1987, A B C et cetera: the life & times of the Roman alphabet
English
Noun
? (plural ?s)
- (text messaging) A question.
- i hav a ? 4 u (I have a question for you)
- objects seen/shaped as the question mark
- a ? block (a question-mark block)
Spanish
Punctuation mark
?
Usage notes
- As SMS messaging and other forms of electronic communication have become more common, some Spanish-speakers use only ? for questions and ! for exclamations, leaving out the initial typographical mark. This is considered non-standard usage.
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