SYM·0092 · Note of admiration
Exclamation mark
the key that wasn’t there
- Unicode
- U+0021 exclamation mark
- Meaning
- Force. Surprise, command, alarm, or volume.
- History
- In English it was called the note of admiration into the nineteenth century — admiration in its older sense of wonder. Its late arrival is measurable in an unexpected place: typewriters did not carry the key until the 1970s, and typists produced it by typing a full stop, backspacing, and overstriking an apostrophe. A punctuation mark that had to be assembled by hand within living memory.
- Variants
- Single; doubled and tripled in informal writing; the interrobang ‽ U+203D merges it with the question mark.
- Related
- ? Question mark; ‽ Interrobang.
- Appears
- Warnings, imperatives, advertising, and the entirety of internet register.
- Evolution
- Wonder → emphasis → tone of voice, and the mark most often used to signal that none is intended.
Sources · 3
- documented “Note of admiration” as the English name for the mark into the nineteenth century.
- documented The absence of a dedicated key on typewriters until the 1970s, and the overstrike method used instead.
- folk That it derives from Latin io, an exclamation of joy, written with I above o. The standard story, and no better evidenced than the parallel claim made for the question mark.