Question Exclamation Mark

Nothing separates this mark from its next-door neighbour except the order of the two shapes and one accident of mobile-phone history. Both were encoded in Unicode 3.0 in September 1999, one codepoint apart, and both are formally compatibility characters — the standard records this one as decomposing into a plain question mark followed by a plain exclamation mark, which is to say it claims to be nothing more than "?!" packed into a single cell.

The order is the part that carries meaning. Question first puts the doubt in front and the outrage behind it, where the exclamation question mark reverses the emphasis and the fused interrobang refuses to choose at all.

Then the two siblings' paths split, for a reason that has nothing to do with typography. When the Japanese mobile carriers' symbol sets were mapped into Unicode, ⁉ was in them — DoCoMo and KDDI both carried it, alongside the double exclamation mark — so it inherited the emoji property when that data was folded in. This one was not in those sets, and stayed ordinary punctuation. The visible result is that on most phones ⁉ arrives as a red, glossy, vendor-drawn icon, while ⁈ renders in whatever typeface the rest of your sentence is set in.

That quietly makes the unpopular twin the better one for running prose. A mark that keeps its colour and its weight will not turn into a picture halfway down a paragraph, and it sits at the size of its neighbours rather than looming over them. The trade-off is coverage: becoming an emoji guaranteed ⁉ a drawing in every font on every device, and ⁈ has no such insurance, so in an unlucky font it can still fall back to a box.

Typing it is unglamorous. There is no named HTML entity, only the numeric forms, and no Alt-code worth committing to memory. In Word, 2048 followed by Alt+X does it; on macOS the Character Viewer at Control-Command-Space is faster than remembering anything; on Linux, Ctrl+Shift+U, then 2048, then Enter. Or type "?!" and carry on, which is what nearly everyone does — and which the standard itself, in its own decomposition rules, says amounts to the same thing.