Its formal Unicode name is Black Question Mark Ornament, and every major platform draws it red. Nothing is broken: in Unicode naming, black and white mean filled and hollow, not colour. Vendors settled on red when the emoji sets were unified in 2010, and the shorter modern name that most software shows — "red question mark" — has quietly won. The hollow sibling at U+2754 is officially White Question Mark Ornament and is also drawn red, just outlined.
It lives in Dingbats rather than in punctuation, which is the useful thing to know. This is a pictograph of a question mark, sized and coloured like an icon; the sentence-ending mark is plain ASCII "?". Drop ❓ into body copy and you get emoji-sized, emoji-coloured type in the middle of a paragraph, plus a screen reader announcing "red question mark" where a reader expected a pause.
In practice it does what a raised eyebrow does. Appended to a quoted claim it registers doubt rather than a genuine question, and two or three in a row read as escalating disbelief — territory the exclamation question mark covers with more precision and less shouting. Spanish speakers get a cleaner tool still in the inverted question mark, which announces the doubt before the sentence starts.
About Red Question Mark
Red Question Mark is the Unicode character ❓ at codepoint U+2753 in the Dingbats block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Red Question Mark
To use the Red 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: '\2753';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2753' evaluates to ❓. In Python source, write '\u2753'.
The character encodes to E2 9D 93 as UTF-8 bytes and 2753 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 10067.
This is a fully-qualified emoji and should render with colour on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Appearance may vary between platforms, but the underlying codepoint is identical everywhere.