Interrobang is the name for a single punctuation mark that combines a question mark with an exclamation mark.

The longer version

One glyph stacks the question mark on top of the exclamation mark so that a single character can show surprise and doubt at once, as in You did what. A type designer in the United States proposed it in the 1960s, and several foundries cut the character, expecting advertising copy to adopt it widely.

Adoption never followed, largely because keyboards and typewriters had no key for it and typesetters could simply print the two marks side by side instead. The mark now exists in the Unicode standard and in a few display fonts, but it remains a curiosity. Related experiments, including an ironic question mark written backwards, met the same limited fate.

Where this entry sits

This category gathers small surprises about the English language, from odd spelling rules to words that quietly hide their own history. Expect palindromes, punctuation oddities, borrowed terms, and the strange ways writing systems record spoken speech. The full list sits on the Words and Language page, where every entry is listed in order.