From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A question mark is a punctuation mark or, more pedantically, a tone mark. It is a full stop, like a period used in interrogatory sentences, such as "Where did you get that hat?" In US English it is also called a query.
The symbol is generally thought to originate from the Latin quæstio, meaning question, which was abbreviated to 'Qo', which was transformed into the symbol.
In some languages, most notably Spanish, every question mark must be opened and closed; an interrogative sentence or phrase begins with an inverted question mark, "¿" and end with the familiar question mark "?". (The same is true of exclamation marks, "¡!".) However, this orthographical tradition is often disregarded in quick typing, especially in chat rooms and Internet forums.
In computers, the question mark is represented as Unicode and ASCII character 63 or 0x003F. The inverted question mark corresponds to Unicode character 191 (0x00BF).
The question mark is used in ASCII renderings of the IPA, such as SAMPA in place of the glottal stop symbol (which resembles "?" without the dot, and corresponds to Unicode character 0x0294 (LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP).
In computer programming, the symbol "?" appears in several programming languages. In C it is part of the ?: operator, which is used for simple boolean conditions. In the POSIX syntax for regular expressions, such as the one used in Perl and Python, ? stands for "zero or one instance of the previous subexpression", i. e. an optional element.
For the rock music band, see ? & the Mysterians.
