Interrobang

The ‘interrobang’ is both an odd word and an odd piece of punctuation.

I am surely not alone in having typed or written ?! or !? at the end of a sentence to indicate that I am both puzzled and shocked.  "The President said what?!"

The interrobang (sometimes as interrabang) combines the exclamation point with a question mark. In the jargon of printers and programmers, this is called a "bang." The glyph is a superimposition of these two marks, as shown here.

The interrobang is not a standard punctuation mark. Few modern typefaces or fonts include a glyph that you can use for the interrobang character. But it can be made in some cases.

The interrobang can be used in some word processors with the alt code Alt+8253 when working in a font that supports the interrobang, or using an operating system that performs font substitution.

You can use it with some keystrokes. In Microsoft Word, try Alt + 8253. In HTML: &#8253.  The standard interrobang is at Unicode code point U+203D will produce ‽ (size increased here for clarity)

Martin K. Speckter conceptualized the interrobang in 1962 while working as the head of an advertising agency. Ge thought that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark.

He proposed the concept of a single punctuation mark in an article in the magazine TYPEtalks and asked for suggestions for a name for the new character. Some suggestions were exclamaquest, QuizDing, rhet, and exclarotive, He chose interrobang because  interrogatio is Latin for "rhetorical question" or "cross-examination" and bang is printers' slang for the exclamation mark.