Useless fact
What is a combined question mark and exclamation point called?
The punctuation mark that combines a question mark and an exclamation point into a single symbol is called an interrobang.
The interrobang was invented in 1962 by Martin K. Speckter, the president of an advertising agency in the United States. Speckter believed that advertisements would look better if copywriters could express surprise and rhetorical questions with a single punctuation mark instead of using a clumsy combination of a question mark and an exclamation point. He proposed the symbol in an article published in the magazine Type Talks and invited readers to suggest a name. The word interrobang was chosen as a combination of interrogatio, the Latin word for rhetorical question or questioning, and bang, which is printers' slang for an exclamation point. In 1966, the symbol was included in the Americana typeface designed by Richard Isbell, and it was also featured on some Remington typewriter models in the late 1960s. Although it never achieved widespread, mainstream adoption in formal writing, the interrobang remains a popular and widely recognized novelty character in modern digital typography and is included in the Unicode standard.
Why this is true — The interrobang is a recognized punctuation mark in modern typography, documented in major dictionaries including Merriam-Webster and Britannica.
Sources
- interrobang Cambridge Dictionary