14 punctuation marks that you never knew existed

8/2/2019 14 Punctuation Marks That You Never KnewExisted

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14 Punctuation Marks That YouNever Knew Existed

Dagger

Also called an Obelisk. This bad boy (on the left), and its two-headed friend(on the right) the Double Dagger or Diesis, represents a javelin, which iscutting out extraneous stuff from your text. Its primary use through the ageshas been to mark out superfluous repetitions in translation, though nowadaysit mostly just stands in as a kind of footnote.

Caret

Also called a Wedge, an Up-Arrow, and a Hat, which is cute. The word caret

is Latin for "it lacks," which is convenient, because the caret is primarily usedto indicate something that's missing from the original text.


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Solidus

Not to be confused with a slash! The Solidus is also called a Shilling Mark(presumably by old British dudes in top hats) and it is at a much steeper anglethan a boring old backslash. Back before decimilization took the world bystorm, the Solidus was used to set apart different values of currency fromeach other.

Asterism

The Asterism has an awesome name, a cool look, and a really lame usage.It's for indicating minor breaks in text. It can also mean "untitled," apparently.


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Guillemets

Guillemets means "Little Williams," which is interesting but unhelpful. They'renamed after a 16th Century French printer. Their primary role is in non-English languages that use them as quotation marks.

Sheffer Stroke

Mainly used for Boolean functions and propositional calculus. Truth tables.Stuff like that.


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Because Sign

This one's so cool. It's like the "Therefore" sign, but upside-down, and itmeans because.

Section Sign

To indicate sections in a text, mostly by lawyers, who are too good for regularpunctuation marks. You probably knew this one, but it's cool-looking, so.

Exclamation Comma

Just because you're excited about something doesn't mean you have to endthe sentence.


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Question Comma

The interrogative version of its best friend the Exclamation Comma.

Interrobang

It's a combo-Exclamation/Question mark, and it's awesome. It is the gloriouspunctuational equivalent of saying OMGWTF?!

Hedera

Hedera is Latin for ivy. Why that is relevant here is not very clear at all, but

this little glyph was used back in the day to mark paragraph breaks. Seemslike it was probably really hard and annoying to draw, but it looks nice.


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Pilcrow

This one's also for paragraph breaks. Most people will be familiar with it,though not with the fact that it's called a Pilcrow. It's also referred to as "TheBlind P," which sounds like a good name for some hopelessly twee indie band."Pilcrow" is the Middle English word for "Paragraph." You will never be able touse that fun fact in real life.

Snark

Also called the Percontation Point and the Irony Mark, this one's used toindicate that there's another layer of meaning in a sentence. Usually asarcastic or ironic one. So it is essentially a tool for smart people to use tomake stupid people feel even stupider. Which makes it the best punctuationmark of all.

14 punctuation marks that you never knew existed

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