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They said what on the news!?

How many times have you typed some variation of that energetic, slightly disbelieving combination of a question mark and an exclamation point? It’s a staple of texts, emails, and social media posts, conveying a specific flavor of emotion that a simple question mark or exclamation point can’t capture on its own. But look at it. It feels a bit… clumsy, doesn’t it? Which one even comes first, the question or the bang? For one man in the 1960s, this typographical inelegance was more than a minor annoyance. It was a problem that needed a solution.

That man was Martin K. Speckter, and his brilliant, quirky solution was the interrobang (‽).

The Ad Man and the Typographical Void

Martin K. Speckter was the head of his own successful advertising agency in the bustling world of 1960s Madison Avenue. In advertising, tone is everything. Copywriters are tasked with grabbing a reader’s attention with pithy, persuasive, and often emotional language. Speckter frequently used rhetorical questions to make a point and create excitement around a product.

Imagine an ad for a new car with the headline: “It has a V8 engine and gets 30 miles per gallon?!”

Speckter felt that ending such a line with two separate punctuation marks looked, in his words, “untidy” and lacked the graphic punch the statement deserved. He believed there should be a single, elegant mark that conveyed both the query and the excitement simultaneously. He saw a void in the English punctuation system, and he decided to fill it himself.

What Do You Call This Thing, Anyway?

In 1962, Speckter introduced his idea to the world in an article for his agency’s trade journal, TYPEtalks. He proposed a new mark that was a superposition of a question mark and an exclamation point—the two symbols literally merged into one sleek glyph.

But what to call it? Speckter offered a few suggestions:

• Exclamaquest
• Quizding
• Interrobang

He ultimately championed the “interrobang.” The name was a clever portmanteau. “Interro” came from the Latin interrogatio, meaning “a questioning.” “Bang” was common printer’s slang for the exclamation point. Together, the interrobang was born: a questioning bang.

Readers of TYPEtalks loved the concept and the name. The interrobang was witty, descriptive, and had a certain flair. The idea began to catch on.

A Brief, Shining Moment

For a few years, the interrobang was the hot new thing in the world of typography and design. Its story was picked up by major publications like the Wall Street Journal and LIFE magazine. It wasn’t just a niche curiosity; it was entering the mainstream conversation.

The real breakthrough came in 1968. In a major vote of confidence, the typewriter company Remington Rand announced it would be adding an interrobang key to its new line of premium typewriters. Smith-Corona followed suit a year later. For a brief, glorious moment, you could purchase a machine that allowed you to type a dedicated interrobang with a single keystroke.

How cool is that‽

The interrobang also gained scholarly acceptance. It was included in the 1969 first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary and the 1970 edition of the Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary. It seemed the interrobang was poised to become a permanent, official member of our punctuation family. It was stylish, useful, and backed by industry. So what went wrong?

Why the Interrobang Didn’t Stick

Despite its promising start, the interrobang’s journey to ubiquity stalled. Its decline can be attributed to a few key factors, most of which have to do with the stubborn inertia of technology and human habit.

The Technology Hurdle

While some high-end typewriters included the ‽ key, most did not. Adding a new character was an expensive modification, and most manufacturers didn’t see the demand. For typesetters using the old hot metal printing process, creating a new character (called a “sort”) was a cumbersome and costly affair. It was far easier for a typist to simply type a question mark, backspace, and overstrike it with an exclamation point.

By the time digital typography arrived, the interrobang faced a new problem: limited character sets. Early digital standards like ASCII had no room for such a “non-essential” character. The interrobang missed its technological window.

The “Good Enough” Problem

Was the interrobang truly necessary? For most people, the `?!` or `!?` combination, while perhaps less elegant, was perfectly understandable and functional. It required no special keys, no new knowledge, and no changes to existing keyboards or fonts. Language change is often driven by necessity, and the interrobang, for all its charm, solved a problem that most people didn’t feel they had. It was a classic case of a “nice-to-have” failing to become a “must-have.”

The Interrobang’s Modern Ghost

So, is the interrobang dead? Not quite. It lives on as a beloved piece of typographical history—a ghost in the machine.

Thanks to Unicode, the universal standard for digital text, the interrobang has its own official place in the digital world: U+203D. Most modern fonts include it, which means you can use it right now if you know how (on Windows, for example, you can often type it with Alt + 8253 on the number pad).

Today, the interrobang is a secret handshake for designers, writers, and linguistics nerds. It appears in logos, articles, and creative projects as a nod to its clever design and ambitious origins. It represents a fascinating moment in time when one person tried to formally enrich our written language with a single, thoughtful mark.

The story of Martin K. Speckter and his interrobang is more than just fun trivia. It’s a perfect anecdote about the evolution of language and the difficulty of imposing change from the top down. Our punctuation, like our words, is shaped by centuries of use, convention, and practicality. The interrobang may not have conquered the keyboard, but it certainly earned its place in our hearts. A beautiful failure, wasn’t it‽