The Return of the Interrobang

by Ron Suresha

What in the world is an interrobang?! Is it the latest morph-transformer toy craze? A violence-prone cult? The Latin for a pollen-airborne type of rural weed that induces mass hayfever?

The interrobang (stress on the second syllable), actually, is a most unusual but functional piece of punctuation, serving as a kind of portmanteau question mark and exclamation point, and is used primarily to demarcate rhetorical statements. For perhaps one hundred years, writers have typed ? and ! conjoined but separately to end such sentences. The use of ?! and !? (typed separately) is common not only in English but also in French and other Romance languages — although a Spanish ø° is admittedly not apparent. This older form of the interrobang is also present in Russian, Hindi, Hebrew, and other languages using non-Roman alphabets.

The interrobang as a discrete punctuation unit was first conceived in 1962 by Martin K. Speckter, an astute New York advertising-agency president and hobbyist printer who advocated precision in writing. At that time, Speckter, who perceived the need of writers to punctuate with accuracy ironic and rhetorical sentences, invited submissions for designs and names for his pet punctuation. He received dozens of ideas from around North America and Europe, and finally settled on the form (?!) and term (the Latin interro for question + printer’s slang bang for exclamation point).

But the interrobang (or interabang, as some of the media that covered the story ineptly misnamed it at the time) proved to be the little punctuation that couldn’t. It gathered a small head of steam for a few years, only to pull slowly back into the station of obscurity. At present it remains largely a typographic steam locomotive, unused and unloved except by a small following that includes an eponymous West-coast pop music magazine and a one-man Boston letterpress. For now, interrobang users must suffer in their irony to type in each mark separately, as in “Hey!?!,” with cartoonish effects.

Although always a marginal conception in the minds of Americans, the interrobang was a uniquely American invention. It was the first new punctuation introduced since the seventeenth century, when the use of the two apostophe marks before and after quotations began — although the use of quotation marks did not become popular until the late eighteenth century. But it is not that Americans are loath to incorporate new punctuation. A whole new linguistics of typographics, namely, emoticons, has emerged from the murky depths of computer and Internet use. Emoticons supply a sort of facial inflection lacking in computer conversation to denote added meaning and, like the interrobang, often irony. These sideways smileys combine punctuation (and sometimes letters) to imply:

🙂 smiling / happy


:-o) shock


;-b… winking/drooling, and


:/ Hmmm / sarcasm.

The Little Punctuation that Couldn’t?!

Why did the interrobang never take its well-deserved place in the Punctuation Hall of Fame? We may venture some guesses, none of which can be verified historically but which may inform us better as to how this punctuation actually functions graphically and linguistically.

The design of the interrobang, to some extent (although surely far from Speckter’s mind at the time), reflected 1960s “mod,” “flower-power” design. Its use arose conicidentally out of the era of Beat American literature, where writers, most notably Allen Ginsberg but many others outside the Beats (including e.e. cummings and Tom Wolfe), were experimenting with punctuation because standard marks apparently did not reflect the extent of their aesthetic and emotional experience. Sometimes a writer simply had to use five bangs at the end of his howl — otherwise, how else could the reader possibly perceive the depth of the writer’s suffering, or the expansion of his consciousness, or the luminosity of his ecstasy?! The interrobang was nonstandard, but it was a time to question and go beyond the merely standard in all ways and forms of culture.

Perhaps another cultural reason that the interrobang never became popularly accepted lies in its uncanny resemblance to the Russian Communist national symbol, the hammer and sickle. Although this similarity was certainly unintended, it may be a reason that some countercultural writers favored such an unusual mode of punctuation. However, the fact that the interrobang was conceived at the height of the Cold War may have possibly struck an unpleasant archetypal anticommunist chord, even if unconsciously, among the American public.

The most likely factor was the timing of the interrobang’s introduction, occurring in the printing trade at the beginning of the end of hot metal type, a scant few years before the introduction of “cold” type. With the technological revolution that phototypesetting brought to the production of the printed word, it may be that the interrobang never firmly established itself as a typo-linguistic phenomenon in time. Martin Speckter’s widow, intimately familiar with her late husband’s work, comments that “the lack of the availability of the mark in the extensive array of typefaces was its greatest drawback . . . and by the time the Apple [Macintosh’s] capabilities were being explored, people’s attention had strayed to other things.”

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, the Pultizer Prize-nominated author, posits three hypotheses as to the downfall of the interrobang. First, he says, is the bottom line — the cost of retrofitting machinery (in the Typewriter Age, remember) at a time it was possible to manually backspace the typewriter to acheive an interrobang effect. Second is the “tremendous effort required to change popular usage” of currently existing punctuation that could be adapted (by typing separately) to one’s purpose. And finally, Pinker points out, “there is always a choice between a larger number of signals and a shorter message, or a shorter number of signals and a longer message.” Which is perhaps the cognitive scientist’s way of saying that people apparently don’t mind typing one extra character — at least in this case — to attain relatively the same linguistic effect.

Although the interrobang was the first punctuation innovation since the Industrial Revolution to receive any mainstream recognition, it is linguistically and graphically hybrid, derivative. The unpopularity of the interrobang may be a linguistic phenomenon called “failed blends” in words, such as “himmer” and “s/he.” Readers familiar with the women’s liberation movement in the sixties may recall the attempt to popularize these nonsexist third-person singular forms, which, interestingly, failed in favor of the phrases “him or her” and “he or she” in the writing and speech of most Americans today.

Perhaps this, then, is a clue to the psychological mindset that undermined the success of the interrobang in American culture: our monominded, diversiphobic culture simply can’t cope with a symbol that so flagrantly combines such apparently contradictory functions. “It either must be a question or a statement — it can’t be both at once” reflects this late-twentieth-century mentality. For the same reason modern society minimally tolerates “mixed” marriages, bilingualism, and transgendered people — because these individuals straddle two cultures and thus are marginalized and poorly understood — the multifunctional interrobang stands alone among punctuation, a typographical outcast at the edge.

An Interrobang Meditation
The interrobang exists not merely as a typographical anomaly, as a punctuation outlaw, a symbol without a clause; it serves as a icon for the cosmos itself. Whathehell?! some readers may be saying. But wait, indulge briefly in the following simple experiment — sort of a guided mini-meditation on the interrobang’s form, which has an effect not unlike a Rorschach test — and discover for yourself what you perceive.

Take this humble little graphic (?!) and photocopy it until it fills a sheet of typewriter paper. Now, tape your full-blown interrobang to a bare wall and look at it. Contemplate its unique form. Notice how the graceful curve of the question mark, also called the hook, contrasts with the stark upward movement of the exclamation mark, also called a shriek in typographers’ jargon. See how the inner arc of the query echos the rounded top edge of the bang. Notice how the blank area, or counterspace, balances the fullness of the image. Notice also how both the query and slam rest above the dot, the seed of the diagram, much like an inverse triangle above a fulcrum.

Now, reading the diagram from the bottom, we start with the seed, the simple and concrete stop. From here it radiates upward, beginning first with the stem of the figure, the slender low section of the slam and then thickening declaratively into the stamen. Then, almost simultaneously with the emergence of the slam, the stem branches out to the right and flowers around and above the slam into its most abstract expression, the open-ended question. In this way, the interrobang design exists as a mandala, a cosmic representation of Nature.

Not unlike the relationship between the masculine and feminine is the dynamic between the slam and the query. In form no less than function, the question represents the feminine and receptive, the exclamation symbolizes the masculine and assertive. In cultures around the world and throughout history, the union of the masculine and feminine has been regarded as the sacred conjuction of the two most elemental principles. The point upon which the two pieces stand individually — as well as dance together in the combined form of the interrobang — represents the seed (or bindu, in Sanskrit) of the entire cosmic creation, the neutral ground upon which the duality of male and female appear.

It is also worth noting that the form of the symbol resembles a linga-yoni, also known more widely as the shivalingam. The shivalingam, according to ancient Samkhya Yoga philosophy, is a symbol of universal creativity, usually depicted as a phallus (linga) contained by or resting on a vulva or female perineum (yoni). The interrobang also demonstrates the same cosmic and graphic principles as the linga-yoni: the assertive phallic and the receptive vaginal. The interrobang, then, is a modern yin-yang, a paradoxical symbol of the integration of gender functions.

Versatility and Then Some
By its inclusiveness of apparent contradictions, the interrobang is indeed quite Zen in its nature. To most Western minds, mustn’t every question require an answer? And yet, can there be an answer without a question? How effortlessly the artful interrobang combines the inquisitive and the declarative, our two most basic syntactic elements.

How else to terminate the sentence “What the hell do you mean by that”? This example serves to introduce the first of several neologisms I have coined (with no prior knowledge of any of the names submitted originally to Martin Speckter) for the interrobang: the Whatthehell. What the term Whatthehell may lack in grace it more than makes up in self-fulfillment and recursiveness. This word denotes in form its function, as the utterance itself demands its own interrobang.

The interrobang, in all its beautiful and terrifying ambiguity, seems to lend itself to endless aliases based on combinations of Latin roots and printer’s jargon for the symbol ! (punctus exclamativus) and the symbol ? (punctus interrogativus). A few of the possibilities I conceived idly: questioslam, exclammoquery, the hilarious-sounding hookshriek, and another form of Whatthehell, where a popular four-letter expletive is exchanged in place of the suffix -hell.

A quick look in the current edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary reveals that the interrobang is appropriate to express rhetorical questions, such as, “Who died and made you queen of the freakin’ universe?!” The interrobang indeed conveys precisely the inflection of such simple raised-eyebrow remarks as “Really?!” without the need for extraneous description of the speaker’s tone of voice. In addition, the innate versatility of the interrobang makes it a wise punctuation choice for other grandiloquent dialogue expressing a wide spectrum of powerful emotions from inquisitiveness and incredulity to demand and forcefulness, even righteous frustration, as in this recent ad headline from Lucent Technologies: “What’s it going to take to get a network that can handle anything?!”

In the sentence “Surely you don’t mean that?!” the interrobang changes entirely the tone of statement and produces an inflection quite different from its similar treatment with either the query or the bang alone. The interrobang adds grumbling humility and resentment to the self-deprecating statement “How could I forget to put gas in the car?!” It conveys bitchy irony and haughtiness in the accusation “How dare you take the car to the movies when I needed it to go to work?!” It introduces dry sarcasm and campy insult into the question “Must you always be such a goody-two-shoes?!” Certainly in the process of transcribing dialogue, for every rhetorical as well as emphatic question, the correct inflection can be captured so concisely by nothing other than the interrobang.

¡Viva the Interrobang!
A miniscule yet growing number of people have believed fervently in the enduring power and majesty of the interrobang. At present, Martin Speckter’s widow, who conspired quietly with Martin on the introduction of the interrobang, is one of the last righteous defenders of the outlaw punctuation. Currently Ms Speckter, with uncanny persistence and determination, is preparing for an all-out interrobang revival. She has recently erected a Web site at www.interrobang-MKS.com (where she advises interrobangers simply to “Use it”) and plans to publish a book as an homage to the interrobang. Fiercely she declares: “My object is to make this punctuation ubiquitous, and to rescue it from obscurity!”

Surely the time is ripe to rally around this most unique yet endangered punctuation mark. In truth, we need the interrobang now more than ever. It fulfills a crucial function in a gum-cracking, sardonic, rhetoric-minded world. But how can interrobangophiles accomplish such a monumental task?

With the advent of desktop graphics, it is a fairly simple matter to construct one’s own special characters and incorporate them into one’s own type character set. But interrobangophiles will also need to lobby type designers and type houses to include them in their type font designs, just as the new Euro-dollar symbol ( € ) is being included. Writers must not only creatively introduce the interrobang into their prose but also insist that the publications to which they submit their writing include the interrobang in those publications’ style sheets. Others will have to demand acceptance of the interrobang from computer standards organizations such as Unicode, a clearinghouse that determines which international letters, accents, symbols, and punctuation are used in computer character sets.

Truly, in an era when the melting pot of American culture drips with the bittersweet juice of irony, there is no piece of punctuation more appropriate than the interrobang to end our sentences. These are years filled with question marks that demand bigger exclamation points that excite even curlier question marks that provoke yet punchier exclamation points . . . and so on. The interrobang is an ideogrammatic tool, rich in functional versatility and full of aesthetic value, that can aid us in this time of multiple and confused meanings. And who couldn’t possibly use that

For more info, go to www.interrobang-mks.com. Many thanks to Mrs. Spekter for her encouragement and support.