Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Origin of... Question Mark

When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio - meaning "question" - at the end of a sentence to indicate a query.

To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem - readers might mistake it for the ending of a word.

So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

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