Question mark Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
A question mark is a punctuation mark and, more pedantically, a tone mark. It usually marks a full stop, replacing the period at the end of an interrogatory sentence, such as "Where did you get that hat?". It can also be used mid-sentence to mark a merely interrogative phrase, where it functions similarly to a comma, as: "Where shall we go? and what shall we do?" but this use is increasingly rare.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 in Spanish typography since the 18th century, 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 inverted 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.
The question mark ? is also used in Chinese and Korean.
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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.
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Chess
In chess notation "?" denotes a bad move, and "??" a blunder.References
See also