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The question mark (also known as an interrogation point, query, or eroteme) is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence. It can also be used mid-sentence to mark a merely interrogative phrase, where it functions similarly to a comma, such as in the single sentence "Where shall we go? and what shall we do?", but this usage is increasingly rare. The question mark is not used for indirect questions.
Convention Some people place a space between the end of their sentence and the question mark. This usage is thought to stem from the French language. In French a space is always placed before question marks, exclamation marks, as well as colons and semicolons (See at French Wikipedia). In English, however, the insertion of this extra blank space is generally considered bad form. The Oxford English Dictionary specifies that no space should precede the question mark. Some English-language books may appear to have these spaces. However, on closer inspection they are not full spaces, tending instead to be half to three-quarters the width of a space. These are not considered spaces; instead, this is simply a form of kerning used to make the text less cramped and thus easier to read. (For detailed discussion of spaces after a question mark, see Full stop.) Origins The symbol is generally thought to originate from the Latin quaestio, meaning "question", which was abbreviated to Qo. The uppercase Q was written above the lowercase o, and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol. Another hypothesis about the origin of the question mark proposes that the mark originated in the 9th century, when it appeared as a point followed by the curvy bit written slanted (similar to the tilde, although the tilde 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, like neumes. Variants in other languages and in history In some languages, such as Spanish and Galician, typography since the 18th century has required opening and closing question marks; an interrogative sentence or phrase begins with an inverted question mark (¿) and ends with the question mark (?) (see more on usage in Spanish). However, this orthographical convention is often disregarded in quick typing and where the inverted character is not easily available from computer keyboards. In Greek and Church Slavonic, a semicolon (;) is used as a question mark. In Arabic, which is written from right to left, the question mark "؟" is mirrored. The question mark is also used in modern writing (though not required) in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. The rhetorical question mark first appeared in the 1580s and was used at the end of a rhetorical question. 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. This usage gradually disappeared in the 1600s. However, there has been recent discussion about re-implementing the rhetorical question mark. Computing In computing, the question mark character is represented by ASCII code 63, and is located at Unicode code-point U+003F. The full-width (double-byte) equivalent, ？, is located at Unicode code point U+FF1F. The question mark is often utilized as a wildcard character - a symbol that can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in a string. In particular "?" is used as a substitute for any one character as opposed to the asterisk, " The question mark is used in ASCII renderings of the International Phonetic Alphabet, such as SAMPA in place of the glottal stop symbol, ʔ, (which resembles "?" without the dot), and corresponds to Unicode code point U+0294, Latin letter glottal stop. In computer programming, the symbol "?" has a special meaning in many programming languages. In the C, "?" is part of the ?: operator, which is used to evaluate simple boolean conditions. In C# 2.0, the "?" modifier and the "??" operator are used to handle nullable data types. 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. In many web browsers, "?" is used to show a character not found in the program's character set. This commonly occurs for apostrophes and quotation marks when they are written with software that uses its own proprietary non-standard code for these characters. Some fonts will instead use the Unicode Replacement Glyph (U+FFFD, �), which is commonly rendered as a white question mark in a black diamond. The generic URL (Universal Resource Locator) syntax allows for a query string to be appended to a resource location in a web address so that additional information can be passed to a script; the query mark, ?, is used to indicate the start of a query string. A query string is usually made up of a number of different field/value pairs, each separated by the ampersand symbol, &, as seen in this url: example.com/login.php?username=test&password=blank. Linguistics In linguistics, the question mark is prepended to strings to show that the linguist cannot determine whether they are well-formed or not. It is used similarly to the asterisk, which marks strings that are clearly ill-formed. It may be doubled to show greater uncertainty, or combined with the asterisk to show that the string is most likely ill-formed but that there is room for doubt. Chess In algebraic chess notation, "?" denotes a bad move, and "??" a blunder. For details see punctuation (chess). Mathematics In mathematics "?" commonly denotes Minkowski's question mark function. Trivia See also | ||||||||
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