Punctuation Symbols

English is usually taught with 14 punctuation marks: the full stop or period ., question mark ?, exclamation mark ! (exclamation point in American usage), comma ,, semicolon ;, colon :, dash —, hyphen -, parentheses ( ), square brackets [ ], braces { }, apostrophe ', quotation marks " " and the ellipsis …. All of them are on the keyboard except the ellipsis and the dashes: what you type as three dots is three separate full stops, while … is one character that never breaks across a line, and the keyboard hyphen-minus - stands in for the real hyphen ‐, the en dash – and the em dash —.

Next to them sit the signs that are punctuation in everything but name. The ampersand & began as a ligature of the Latin et, and its name comes from schoolchildren reciting the alphabet and ending with "and per se and". The at sign @ was a merchant's "at the rate of" for centuries before Ray Tomlinson picked it for the first email address in 1971. The number sign # is also the pound sign, the octothorpe (a Bell Labs name from the touch-tone phone) and, since 2007, the hashtag. % percent, * asterisk, / slash, \ backslash, _ underscore and | vertical bar complete the keyboard row.

Quotation marks, brackets and dashes each have a whole family of their own, and they get their own pages here: Quotation Mark Symbols, Bracket Symbols and Dash & Hyphen Symbols. This page keeps the one keyboard form of each so that the full set of 14 is in one place.

Rare punctuation marks: interrobang ‽, irony mark ⸮, asterism ⁂

The ‽ interrobang fuses a question mark and an exclamation mark into one glyph for a question asked in disbelief: You did what‽. Martin K. Speckter, the head of a New York advertising agency, proposed it in 1962 and named it from interrogatio plus bang, the printers' slang for an exclamation mark. The Americana typeface of 1966 was the first to include it, and it has lived in Unicode since the General Punctuation block of 1993. Its upside-down twin ⸘, for Spanish, came in Unicode 5.1 (2008); the ornamental 🙹 🙺 🙻 are heavy display versions from the dingbat fonts.

If your font lacks ‽, the two-character forms do the same job: ⁈ question-exclamation, ⁉ exclamation-question and ⁇ a doubled question mark, all three added in Unicode 3.2 (2002). On phones ⁉️ and ‼️ show as emoji, big and red.

The ⸮ reversed question mark is older than any of them. The English printer Henry Denham used it in the 1580s as the percontation point, to mark a rhetorical question that expects no answer, and it was revived in the 20th century as an irony mark for sarcasm. The medieval ⹔ question mark and ⹓ exclamation mark, the shapes scribes drew before printing settled on ? and !, are the newest of the family: Unicode added them in 2021, so some fonts still show them as a box.

⁂ the asterism, three asterisks in a triangle, once marked a section break or a minor subdivision in a book; today the same job is done by a centred row of asterisks or a blank line, so the mark itself has become a rarity people seek out on purpose. ⁕ the flower punctuation mark and ⁎ ⁑ the low and stacked asterisks come from the same tradition of typographic ornaments.

Paragraph, section and footnote marks: ¶ § † ‡ ※

¶ the pilcrow is the paragraph mark. Medieval scribes drew it as a decorated C for capitulum (chapter), and the lettering was often left for a rubricator to add in red; when the rubricator never came, the gap stayed, which is one story of how the paragraph indent was born. Word shows a pilcrow for every paragraph break when formatting marks are on, and lawyers cite ¶ 4 for the fourth paragraph. ⁋ is its mirror image, ❡ a curved ornament, and ⸿ the capitulum, the ancestor itself.

§ the section sign, most likely two intertwined S's for signum sectionis, cites sections of statutes and contracts: § 12, or §§ 12–15 for a range. In German, Polish and the Nordic countries it is how people write "paragraph of the law" in everyday text. Its sibling marks are covered in depth in Copyright & Legal Symbols.

Footnotes have their own traditional order of reference marks: *, then † dagger, ‡ double dagger, §, ‖ and ¶, starting over doubled when a page needs more. The dagger descends from the obelus that the scholars of ancient Alexandria put beside lines of Homer they judged spurious; in genealogies and biographies a lone † before a year still means "died". ※ is the Japanese komejirushi, the "rice mark", which opens a note or caveat the way an asterisk does in English, and it is widely used across Japanese and Korean websites and forms.

⁊ the Tironian et is the oldest "and" sign in use. It comes from the shorthand of Tiro, the secretary of Cicero, and it survives in Irish, where it stands for agus on road signs and in print. … the horizontal ellipsis marks an omission or a trailing-off thought; ⋯ is the centred version mathematicians use between terms, ⋮ the vertical one, and ‥ a two-dot leader.

Punctuation in other languages: ¿ ¡ ؟ ; 。 ।

Spanish opens a question with ¿ and an exclamation with ¡, so that a reader knows the tone from the first word: ¿Qué hora es? ¡Qué bien!. The Real Academia Española recommended the inverted question mark in 1754, and Galician and Asturian use the pair as well. Catalan and Basque writers do not.

Arabic, Persian and Urdu write right to left, so their marks are mirrored: ؟ is the question mark, ، the comma and ؛ the semicolon. Greek asks a question with ;, a mark that looks exactly like a semicolon, and uses the raised dot · (ano teleia) where English has a semicolon. Unicode treats both as equivalent to the Latin semicolon and middle dot, which is why pasting them into some editors turns them into the ordinary ; and ·. Armenian puts its question mark ՞ and exclamation mark ՜ over the stressed vowel of the word they refer to, and its full stop ։ looks like a colon.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean marks fill a full character cell: the ideographic full stop 。, the enumeration comma 、 used between items in a list, and fullwidth ，？！：； for the rest. Japanese adds ・, the middle dot that separates words in katakana loan phrases, and ※ for notes. The small forms ﹐ ﹒ ﹖ ﹗ are for footnotes and the vertical forms ︐ ︒ ︖ ︕ for text that runs top to bottom. Outside East Asia, fullwidth ？ and ！ have become an aesthetic choice in captions and usernames because of the air around them.

Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit end a sentence with the danda । (pūrṇa virām) and a verse with the double danda ॥; the other marks are borrowed from English and called alpa virām (comma), ardha virām (semicolon), praśnavāchak chihn (question mark) and vismayādibodhak chihn (exclamation mark). Amharic and Tigrinya use the Ethiopic four-dot full stop ። and two-dot comma ፣, Burmese ။ and ၊, Mongolian ᠃ and ᠂, and the Hebrew Bible closes each verse with ׃ sof pasuq.

Punctuation emoji ❓ ❗ ‼️ ⁉️ and how to type the rest

Phones carry a small set of punctuation emoji: ❓ red question mark, ❔ its white or grey outline, ❗ red exclamation mark, ❕ white exclamation mark, ‼️ double exclamation and ⁉️ exclamation question mark; the keycaps #️⃣ *️⃣ and 🔣 input symbols come from the same Japanese phone keyboards, and 〰️ wavy dash is the Japanese long-vowel wave. ❓ ❔ ❕ were added to Unicode 6.0 in 2010 along with the rest of the first big emoji batch. In a chat a lone ❓ means "what?" or "explain", ❗ flags something urgent, ‼️ is excitement or alarm, and ⁉️ is the emoji interrobang: shock and a question at once. The text marks ? and ! stay plain and black in any app; the emoji are coloured pictures that follow the platform's style.

Windows: hold Alt and type the code on the numeric keypad, 0191 for ¿, 0161 for ¡, 0133 for …, 0167 for §, 0182 for ¶, 0134 for † and 0135 for ‡. In Word, any mark can be typed by its Unicode number followed by Alt+X: 203D Alt+X gives ‽, 2E2E Alt+X gives ⸮ and 2042 Alt+X gives ⁂. Mac: Option+Shift+? for ¿, Option+1 for ¡, Option+; for …, Option+6 for §, Option+7 for ¶, Option+T for † and Option+Shift+7 for ‡. On a phone, long-press ? or ! to find ¿ and ¡, and copy the rest from this page.