Exclamation-Mark.com

The Exclamation Mark and it's Use in Natural Language

Frequent use of the exclamation mark is common in writing in advertising. Some brands cleverly, but confusingly, contain an exclamation mark (examples include the search engine Yahoo! and the game show Jeopardy!) Some comic books, especially superhero comics of the mid-20th century, routinely use the exclamation mark instead of the period, as periods tended to disappear due to cheap printing processes. Overuse of the exclamation mark is generally considered poor writing, since it distracts the reader and reduces the mark's meaning. Some authors however, most notably the American Tom Wolfe, are known for unashamedly liberal use of the exclamation mark.

The English town of Westward Ho!, named after the novel by Charles Kingsley, is the only place name in the United Kingdom that officially contains an exclamation mark. There is a town in Quebec called Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, which officially contains two exclamation marks in its name. The titles of several musical comedies such as Oklahoma! and Oh! Calcutta! also contain exclamation marks.

The exclamation mark is also used in Chinese, Korean and Japanese (which don't use the Latin script).

In some languages, such as Spanish, a sentence or clause ending in an exclamation mark must also begin with an inverted exclamation mark (the same also applies to the question mark):

¿Estás loco? ¡La mataste! (English: “Are you out of your mind? You killed her!”)

In Khoi, Bushmen, and the International Phonetic Alphabet, the exclamation mark is used as a letter to indicate the retroflex click sound represented as q in Zulu orthography. In Unicode this letter is properly coded as U+01C3 (!) and distinguished from the common punctuation symbol U+0021 (!) to allow software to deal properly with word breaks.

There is a punctuation mark intended to combine the functions of a question mark and an exclamation mark in English called interrobang, which resembles those marks superimposed over one another but the sequence of “?!” is used more often.

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