Where does the exclamation mark come from?
It is the mark of a shout, but it began as the mark of wonder. Its name means 'cry out,' and the pretty story about its shape is almost certainly too neat to be true.
The exclamation mark is a little drawing of a raised voice, and its name says exactly that. It comes from the Latin exclamare, “to cry out,” from ex, “out,” and clamare, “to shout.” The same shout lives in claim, proclaim, acclaim, and clamour. Before English settled on that noisy name, though, it called the mark something much gentler.
The point of admiration
For its first two or three hundred years, the mark was known as the point of admiration, or the note of admiration. The word admiration there carries its older sense, not flattery but wonder, astonishment, the catch of breath when something amazes you. So the mark began as a sign of wonder, and only later hardened into a sign of shouting. The stroke you now use to yell in a text message was invented to mark the moment you are struck with awe.
Where the shape came from
So why that shape, a line dropped onto a dot? The story most often told is a pretty one. Medieval scribes, it is said, marked a joyful outburst with the Latin word io, a cry of joy, and to save room they stacked it, the I above the o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the I thinned to a stroke, and what was left was the exclamation mark.
It is a lovely account, and, like a great many lovely accounts, it is not actually proven. No scribe left a note explaining what they were doing, and paleographers treat the io story as a charming guess rather than a fact. It is exactly the kind of too-neat origin worth enjoying and doubting at the same time. What is certain is only that the mark itself appears in European writing by the late fourteenth century.
The mark with no key
Here is a stranger fact, and a true one. For most of the twentieth century, you could not simply type an exclamation mark. Typewriters did not give it a key of its own. To make one, a typist struck a full stop, backspaced, and typed an apostrophe on top of it, three motions for a single character. The exclamation mark did not earn its own key on standard keyboards until around the 1970s. The mark of pure excitement was, for decades, the most laborious thing on the page.
The screamer, the bang, and the upside-down twin
Printers and journalists, who long thought it vulgar, gave it rude nicknames: the screamer, the gasper, the startler. Programmers call it the bang, which is why the #! at the top of a script is a shebang. Spanish is more considerate: it doubles the mark, opening an exclamation with an upside-down ¡ so the reader knows the shout is coming before arriving at it. And in 1962 an advertising man named Martin Speckter tried to wed it to the question mark, inventing the interrobang, ‽, for sentences that ask and exclaim at once. That one never quite caught on.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have warned that using an exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke. Perhaps. But the mark began life as the little stroke you put down when plain words could not carry your astonishment, the sign of wonder rather than the sign of noise. There are worse things to leave on a page, and once you know it started as a mark of pure amazement, it is hard to begrudge it.
The Monthly Lemma follows one everyday word a month all the way back to its root, then posts the whole story to your door. One word, and the world behind it.
A word like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of The Monthly Lemma, printed and posted to your door. A quietly perfect gift for anyone who loves words.