Exclamation Question Mark

The Exclamation Question Mark at U+2049 combines an exclamation mark and a question mark into one punctuation character for an emphatic question. It is part of the General Punctuation block and serves the same basic role as writing an exclamation point followed by a question mark in ordinary text. Its most common use is in expressive writing: comics, captions, headlines, chat messages, and social media posts where a question is meant to sound surprised, shocked, indignant, or excited. A line such as “You did what⁉” reads as both a question and an outburst, more intense than a plain question mark but more compact than two separate marks. It is closely related to the interrobang, but the two are not identical: the interrobang is a single blended punctuation mark, while this character preserves the side-by-side exclamation-question sequence as one encoded sign. In practice, many people still type the two separate ASCII marks instead, because U+2049 is less available on keyboards and may be less reliably matched in search than the ordinary two-character form.