When early scholars would write in Latin, they placed the word "questio" (meaning “question”) at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing was soon shortened to "qo". This caused another problem, as readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.
Like the question mark, the exclamation point was invented by stacking letters. The mark comes from the Latin word io, meaning “exclamation of joy.” Written vertically, with the i above the o, it forms the exclamation point we use today.
In computer programming, the symbol of often referred to as "not", representing the negative of a boolean expression. For example:
This symbol is stylized "et", the Latin word for “and.” Although it was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C. as a part of his Tironian notes shorthand system. The Ampersand didn’t get its current name until centuries later.
In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned this symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. Since the symbol had no name, they ended their ABCs with “and, per se, and” meaning “&, which means ‘and.’” This phrase was slurred into one garbled word that eventually caught on with everyone: ampersand.
The odd name for this ancient sign for numbering derives from 'thorpe', the Old Norse word for a village or farm that is often seen in British placenames. The symbol was originally used in mapmaking, representing a village surrounded by eight fields, so it was named the octothorp.
Fingertips: Factoids
