About Inverted Question Mark
Inverted Question Mark is the Unicode character ¿ at codepoint U+00BF in the Latin-1 Supplement block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The opening question mark of Spanish, and the character Unicode names with the alias turned question mark. It is Po in the Latin-1 Supplement, encoded in version 1.1 and inherited from ISO 8859-1. Its line-break class is OP, open punctuation — the same class as an opening bracket, and a line may not break after it. It carries neither Terminal_Punctuation nor Sentence_Terminal, so nothing in the standard treats it as able to end a sentence. The chart cross-references the ordinary question mark, the inverted interrobang and the reversed question mark, three characters that are related to it by shape and by nothing else.
Typical uses
- Opening an interrogative sentence or clause in Spanish
- Marking where the question begins, which is often mid-sentence
- Paired with the closing question mark at both ends of the interrogative span
At a glance
- U+00BF, Latin-1 Supplement; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category Po
- East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class OP; Windows-1252 byte 0xBF
- HTML: ¿ and the legacy ¿ without a semicolon
- Not Terminal_Punctuation and not Sentence_Terminal
Historical Notes
Origins
The decision that produced this mark is documented. The point worth separating out is that the rule attaches the mark to the start of the interrogative tone rather than to the start of the sentence, which is why a correctly punctuated Spanish sentence often carries the opener in the middle of a line.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, at byte 0xBF in the Latin-1 Supplement and therefore in Windows-1252 as well. That placement is the whole reason both Spanish opening marks came through the eight-bit era intact while later punctuation did not.
What the standard says about the pair
Unicode's annotation names Spanish alone for this character and Spanish, Asturian and Galician for its exclamation partner. Both carry line-break class OP, which is the standard classifying them as openers rather than as terminators — the same treatment it gives brackets. That is a property statement, not a style opinion, and it is the clearest evidence the standard offers about what the marks are for.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Inverted Question Mark
To use the Inverted Question 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: '\BF';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u00BF' evaluates to ¿. In Python source, write '\u00BF'.
The character encodes to C2 BF as UTF-8 bytes and 00BF as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 191.
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. No conforming line breaker will break after it, which is exactly right and occasionally unexpected.
- Not a sentence terminator: sentence-splitting code driven by Sentence_Terminal will not treat it as a boundary.
- Windows-1252 byte 0xBF. Mis-decoded UTF-8 renders it as ¿, the standard symptom of a decoding fault.
- Stable under all four normalisation forms.
- Both HTML forms are valid: ¿ and the semicolon-less ¿.
In the Wild
The Project Gutenberg plain text of Don Quijote — 2,123,954 characters — carries 959 opening question marks against 960 closing ones. In edited Spanish prose the opener is not optional, and the count says so with almost no margin.
Five Spanish-language news home pages on 5 August 2026 tell the second half. 20minutos carried twenty-three, Clarín nine, El Mundo four, ABC and Marca two each: forty in all, and every one of those pages also carried closing question marks in similar numbers.
The opener holds up on a news page in a way its exclamation partner does not — fourteen occurrences across the same five pages, twelve of them on one sports site. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Where does the opening mark go?
Where the question starts, not where the sentence starts. It is common and correct for it to appear part-way through a line.
Can I leave it out?
Spanish teaching and the language academy treat that as an error. In edited prose the opener is essentially never dropped.
Is it a sentence terminator?
No. Unicode gives it neither Terminal_Punctuation nor Sentence_Terminal; its line-break class is the one used for opening brackets.
Why does it show as ¿?
UTF-8 bytes are being decoded as Windows-1252. That is a pipeline problem, not a font problem.