Curious Characters

Interrobangs and their type. A curated palette of rare punctuation marks with the history behind each one.

Curious Characters: Rare Punctuation Marks. The interrobang ‽ and 29 other rare punctuation marks a keyboard won't give you. One click to insert, with the story behind each. (129 chars) These are not emoji. They are punctuation marks — the marks working typographers, editors, and typesetters have used for centuries. The interrobang ‽ is the youngest at just over sixty years old. The dagger † descends from a mark used by scholars at the Library of Alexandria around 200 BCE. Curious Characters is a curated palette of 30 rare punctuation marks, grouped by purpose, each with a small history explaining where it came from. Click any mark to insert it into the field your cursor was in, or copy it to the clipboard as a fallback. FEATURES Click a mark to insert it at your cursor. Falls back to clipboard on sites where insertion is blocked, and on privileged pages like PDF viewers. A "Most used" strip at the top tracks your five favourites and syncs across your signed-in Chromes. Right-click any recent to remove it; a Clear button empties the strip. Click any section title (or its "story" hint) for the full history of every mark in that group, plus how to enter it by its Unicode codepoint on Windows, macOS, and Linux — including the classic Alt+decimal method on the numpad .THE MARKS Tone ‽ Interrobang · ⸘ Inverted interrobang · ⁉ Exclamation question mark · ⁈ Question exclamation mark · ⸮ Percontation point Structure ¶ Pilcrow · ❦ Hedera · ☙ Reversed hedera · ⁂ Asterism · § Section sign · ※ Reference mark Reference † Dagger · ‡ Double dagger · ☞ Manicule · ☜ Left manicule · ⁁ Proofreader's caret · ⁊ Tironian et Logic ∵ Because · ∴ Therefore Typography – En dash · — Em dash · … Ellipsis · ′ Prime · ″ Double prime · « » ‹ › Guillemets · № Numero · ★ Black star Most of these marks are older than the keyboard. They've been left off standard layouts because there wasn't room, not because they aren't useful. The interrobang saves you an exclamation mark plus a question mark. The Tironian et ⁊ is still on every road sign in Ireland. The section sign § is on every legal document. The em dash and the en dash have completely different jobs. Yet none of them are one keystroke away in most apps. TECHNICAL NOTES Marks are real Unicode characters, not images. They render in any modern app that supports Unicode text, which is essentially all of them. A handful of the rarer marks (the Tironian et, the reversed hedera) may fall back to a substitute glyph if your system fonts don't include them — this is a font coverage issue on your system, not a bug in the extension. The extension requires permission to read and modify page content on http(s) sites. This is used only to remember which text field you were last typing in, so the popup can insert a mark at your cursor when you click. Nothing is transmitted, tracked, or stored beyond your local browser. No ads. No tracking. No account required.