About Inverted Exclamation Mark
Inverted Exclamation Mark is the Unicode character ¡ at codepoint U+00A1 in the Latin-1 Supplement block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The opening exclamation mark of Spanish, Asturian and Galician. It has no closing partner of its own — the sentence ends on the ordinary exclamation mark — and its sibling is the inverted question mark, which works the same way. Unicode files it as Po in the Latin-1 Supplement, encoded in version 1.1 in 1993 and inherited from ISO 8859-1 before that. Its line-break class is OP, open punctuation, which is the machine-readable version of what it does: a line may not break after it, because it belongs to whatever follows. It carries neither the Terminal_Punctuation nor the Sentence_Terminal property, so the standard does not consider it capable of ending anything. HTML has named it since the beginning, and — unusually — accepts the name with or without its semicolon.
Typical uses
- Opening an exclamatory sentence or clause in Spanish, Asturian and Galician
- Marking the exact span that is exclaimed, which can be shorter than the sentence
- In extended IPA, a sublaminal lower alveolar percussive
At a glance
- U+00A1, Latin-1 Supplement; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category Po
- East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class OP; Windows-1252 byte 0xA1
- HTML: ¡ and the legacy ¡ without a semicolon
- Not Terminal_Punctuation and not Sentence_Terminal
Historical Notes
Origins
The opening marks are a deliberate reform rather than an inheritance, and the record of that reform survives outside the standard. What the character data adds is narrower and worth separating from the history: Unicode's own notes name Spanish, Asturian and Galician, and nothing else, as the languages that use this mark in ordinary orthography.
Unicode
Encoded in Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, but its real luck was earlier. It sits at byte 0xA1 in ISO 8859-1, and therefore at 0xA1 in Windows-1252, which is the single reason it survived the decades when anything outside ASCII was liable to arrive as a question mark. The punctuation marks that missed that range — and most of the marks encoded alongside it in General Punctuation did — have had a much thinner time of it since.
A second life on a phonetics chart
Unicode records one use that has nothing to do with Spanish. The extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet, used for transcribing disordered speech, press the character into service for a sublaminal lower alveolar percussive. The standard states the use in its own annotation, so it is documented rather than folkloric.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Inverted Exclamation Mark
To use the Inverted Exclamation Mark symbol (¡) in HTML, insert the
entity ¡ directly into your markup. The decimal entity ¡ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\A1';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u00A1' evaluates to ¡. In Python source, write '\u00A1'.
The character encodes to C2 A1 as UTF-8 bytes and 00A1 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 161.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.
Things to know
- Line break class OP: a conforming line breaker will not break after it, which is correct and occasionally surprising in narrow columns.
- It is not a sentence terminator. Any code that splits sentences on Terminal_Punctuation will pass straight over it, as it should.
- Windows-1252 byte 0xA1. Mis-decoding UTF-8 as Windows-1252 turns it into the two-character sequence ¡, which is the classic sign of a broken pipeline rather than a font problem.
- Stable under all four normalisation forms, so nothing here is lost or altered by NFC, NFD, NFKC or NFKD.
- Both HTML forms work: ¡ and the semicolon-less ¡, a legacy the newer punctuation marks never got.
In the Wild
The Project Gutenberg plain text of Don Quijote — 2,123,954 characters of edited Spanish prose — carries 685 opening exclamation marks against 694 closing ones. In a properly set Spanish text the opener is present essentially every time the closer is.
Five Spanish-language news home pages on 5 August 2026 are the contrast, and they split. Marca carried twelve, Clarín two, and El Mundo, ABC and 20minutos carried none at all — while the same five pages carried forty opening question marks between them.
On a home page the exclamation opener is the first thing to go, and its partner is not. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Why does Spanish need an opening mark at all?
Because it marks the span, not the sentence. The pair tells a reader exactly which words are exclaimed, which the closing mark alone cannot do.
Is it just an upside-down exclamation mark?
As a shape, roughly. As a character, no: it is a separate codepoint with a different line-break class, and it is not a sentence terminator.
Why does it survive in old files when other punctuation does not?
It sits at byte 0xA1 in Latin-1 and Windows-1252, so it came through the eight-bit era intact.
What is ¡ doing in my text?
That is this character's UTF-8 bytes being read as Windows-1252. Fix the decoding, not the character.