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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?".
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 ends with the familiar question mark "?". (The same is true of exclamation marks, "¡" and "!".) However,
this orthographical tradition is often disregarded in quick typing,
especially in chat rooms and Internet forums, and where the character is not easily available from the keyboard.
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.
Use in computing
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), and can be accessed from the keyboard in Microsoft Windows by holding the [Alt] key and typing 0 1 9 1 on the numeric
keypad.
The question mark is used in ASCII renderings of the International Phonetic Alphabet, 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.
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