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Ladies and Gentleman the Interrobang

June 20th, 2008 · 5 Comments

Let me introduce you to a very bad ass punctuation mark. My little friend here is called the Interrobang and despite OS X not having that word in its dictionary it is a very real thing. When dealing with weird internets it is very often needed when trying to phrase a question with disbelief or excitement.

Why is it then that we never learned about the interrobang in schools or seen it in the printed media? Well there is not easy answer to those questions, it is officially the red headed step child of the english punctuation world. Locked up in the cellar and beaten into submission, we can pretend it isn’t real but one day it is going to stab you in the eye with a fork.  

You will often feel the need to use “!?” or “?!” but I implore you please bring the interrobang into common usage. It is far to wickedly awesome not to be included in ever letter to the editor or lolcats picture. 

Typing the interrobang
Copy and Paste: ‽
HTML:  &*#8253 or &*#x203D (Remove the “*”)
OS X: Command + Option + T, then select “Punctuation”, it is in there
Linux: No Idea, if someone figures it out drop in a comment
Windows: ALT+8253

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5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Weird Chips // Jun 21, 2008 at 1:50 am

    [...] Advertisement ← Ladies and Gentleman the Interrobang [...]

  • 2 John Cholewa // Apr 2, 2009 at 2:41 pm

    This is an oldish post, but I just excitedly learned about this mark, so I figured I’d put in what I had of value:

    In Linux (and BSD and similar systems), there are a few ways, but the historically fun way is by using a Compose key.

    You have first to tell your system what key on your keyboard you want to use as a Compose key (in the old days, there was a dedicated Compose key just like there are dedicated Ctrl and Alt keys now). In KDE, for instance, you go to the KDE Control Center, to the Regional / Keyboard Layout. There are a whole bunch of “Xkb Options” in there, among which are “Compose Key Position”. I choose “Menu is Compose”, because the Menu key (the one near Right Ctrl that acts like clicking the right mouse button) is pretty useless for 999‰ of people.

    (if you’re not using KDE, the methods are probably still pretty easy, but the quicker way should be to add “setxkbmap -option compose:menu” [without the double-quote] in a startup file in “/home/yourname/” [probably .xinitrc or .bashrc or something, I'm iffy on that part], and it’ll enable the Menu key to become the Compose key)

    Then a whole bunch of special characters will become available. Tap (don’t hold down) the Compose key, then tap two or three additional keys, and the character appears. Compose,a,e makes æ. Compose,o,o makes °. And so forth.

    I don’t think interrobang exists by default, but the thing about Compose is that you can define the sequences yourself. In “/home/yourname/”, make a file called “.XCompose”. Fill it with the following three lines:
    include “%L”
    : “‽”
    : “‽”

    If everything’s set up right, it will use this file, and you’ll be able to type a ‽ by typing Compose,!,? or Compose,?,!

  • 3 John Cholewa // Apr 2, 2009 at 2:45 pm

    blast, the submission ate my < and > keys. I’ll write the .XCompose file again:
    include “%L”
    <Multi_key> <exclam> <question> : “‽”
    <Multi_key> <question> <exclam> : “‽”

    (there are some keywords that you use inside those angular brackets, by the way … you can browse inside the file “/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose” for examples — that’s the file that it Xkb uses if you’re in the US locale and either don’t have your own .XCompose file or have that include “%L” at the top of it)

  • 4 Alister // Oct 31, 2009 at 9:38 pm

    Also, if you don’t have a compose key sequence for it you can still enter a unicode character in Linux by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-U, then its unicode number

  • 5 Alister // Oct 31, 2009 at 9:43 pm

    Sorry, that’s a unicode code obviously, not a number. So in this case
    CTRL-SHIFT-U then 203D

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