Presentations of ❓︎
Text style |
Emoji style
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❓︎ |
❓️
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Note: Character's appearance may be different on each system. Text style is forced with ︎ and emoji style with ️
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Presentations of ❔︎
Text style |
Emoji style
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❔︎ |
❔️
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Note: Character's appearance may be different on each system. Text style is forced with ︎ and emoji style with ️
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Etymology
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? may derive from Qo, with the Q written over the o, an abbreviation of Latin quaestio (“question”), placed at the end of a question to mark it as such.[1]
Punctuation mark
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? (English name question mark)
- Used in various left-to-right scripts, including notably the Latin script, to mark the preceding sentence as a question.
- (comics, Internet slang) Used by itself to convey that the speaker is confused.
- Character #1: "I have no time to explain! Have you seen a Big Bad Wolf blowing down various houses?"
- Character #2: "?"
- (linguistics) Marks the following word or phrase as questionable for a grammatical or semantic-pragmatic reason.
2006, Renaat Declerck, Susan Reed, Bert Cappelle, “The Grammar of the English Verb Phrase”, in The Grammar of the English Tense System, volume 1 (in English), →ISBN, page 6:A superscript question mark will be used similarly to indicate that a sentence or constituent is questionable for a grammatical or semantic-pragmatic reason. A double superscript question mark indicates an even higher degree of questionability.
I have never { worked / ?been working } on a dissertation
This time tomorrow I { will / ??am going to } be driving to London.
See also
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- For the reversed question mark used in some right-to-left scripts, such as the Arabic script, see ؟.
?
- A placeholder for an unknown word, phrase, text, or numerical value.
2009, Terry Stickels, Math Puzzles and Brainteasers, Grades 3-5: Over 300 Puzzles that Teach Math and Problem-Solving Skills (in English), John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 6:What is the next number in the sequence below?
1 4 9 16 25 36 ?
- (chess) In algebraic notation, marking a bad move.
- (programming) A wildcard for one character in query language.
- (programming) The ternary operator in some programming languages.
- (regular expressions) Detects zero or one occurrences of the preceding element.
- The string
colou?r
matches both "color" and "colour".
- (networking) In a URL, begins a query string (a series of data formatted as field-value pairs).
https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Wiktionary:Word_of_the_day&action=view&useskin=monobook
Usage notes
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Quotations
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For quotations using this term, see Citations:?.
Derived terms
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See also
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Punctuation
References
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- ^ Alexander Humez, 1987, A B C et cetera: the life & times of the Roman alphabet