Learn English – the origin of the exclamation mark

etymologyexclamation-mark

Granted this applies to more than English, but I hope it's not off topic.

Recently I wondered when the exclamation point/mark entered our language and how. I did search the site for an answer and didn't find one.

With Googling, I accumulated a lot of interesting tidbits (below), but no good answer. The most repeated story follows.

Smithsonian.com posits that ! has it's origin in the Latin exclamation of joy, io, where the i was written over the o.

I was pretty surprised by this, as I have never seen it that way (given, I don't have a lot of Latin manuscripts hanging around.) They did state, though, that:

…it wasn’t until 1970 that the exclamation point had its own key on the keyboard. Before that, you had to type a period, and then use the backspace to go back and stick an apostrophe above it.*

Wikipedia gives the same origin as Smithsonian.com with a touch more detail:

The modern graphical representation is believed to have been born in the Middle Ages. The Medieval copyists used to write at the end of a sentence the Latin word io to indicate joy. The word io meant hurray. Along time, the i moved above the o, and the o became smaller, becoming a point.

The sources of the above are not easy to access.

Sentence First gave a colorful account of the various names for the exclamation mark, beginning with Ben Johnson's term for it: admiration mark, but, sadly, no history.

The American Bookmaker, A Journal of Technical Art and Information states in the May, 1888 edition:

The popular notion has always been that… the exclamation point (!) owes its existence to the Latin word Io (joy)… This explanation of the origin… is ingenious and one might almost say picturesque. For it, the world is indebted to one Willem Bilderdijk, a Dutch poet and philologist, born at Amsterdam in 1756. This entirely fanciful exegesis… goes to show that, with true poetic insight, Bilderdijk looked to his imagination rather than to scientific investigation for his facts.

I'm inclined to believe the above. Again, however, no actual history is given.

Interestingly, in an unrelated entry about dropped caps, a blogger posts an image of an illuminated manuscript that has what might possibly be interpreted as exclamation points (e.g. see Col. 1, third line from the bottom.)

enter image description here

However, above that, the same mark is found where there is a question in the Latin Vulgate (starting line 8 from the bottom):

Infirmatur quis in vobis (strange mark) inducat presbyteros ecclesiae et orent super eum unguentes eum oleo in nomine Domini: et oratio fidei salvabit infirmum (and here again the strange mark) et adlevabit eum Dominus et si in peccatis sit dimittentur ei…

Translated:

Is any man sick among you? Let him bring in the priests of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick man . (<- Note, no question.) And the Lord shall raise him up…

And even further up:

ecce beatificamus qui sustinuerunt sufferentiam Iob audistis (strange mark) et finem Domini…

Which translates to:

Behold, we account them blessed who have endured. You [have heard of the patience of] Job (strange mark, translation not exact because the syntax is a bit different) and you have seen the end of the Lord…

So, I am no closer to the answer than I was when I began.

Any help would be appreciated.

I actually remember doing this on my dad's Smith-Corona. 🙁

NYT opinion writer Ben Yagota wrote, "A friend’s 12-year-old daughter once said that in her view, a single exclamation point is fine, as is three, but never two. My friend asked her where this rule came from and the girl said, 'Nowhere. It’s just something you learn.'" Two exclamation marks look strange to me, too.

"They were apparently also casually known by the names shriekmark, screamer, bang, pling, smash, soldier, and control (via About.com); gasper, startler, and dog’s cock (from Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves); the more alliterative dog’s dick; and slammer. Plausible but unverified names include ball-bat, boing, dembanger, eureka, screech, shout pole, smash, spark-spot, and wham."

Best Answer

I hesitate to take this topic even farther afield, yet getting at the origin may take it there.

An unsupported article by Frank Mulligan titled "The exciting history of the exclamation mark!" (Taunton Daily Gazette, Feb. 22, 2010), makes these claims:

Archeologists believe they identified the first pre-historic exclamation mark in a cave painting unearthed in northern France depicting a lone, proud hunter poised to hurl a spear at a wooly mammoth on one wall’s face.

On the opposing face of the cave’s wall, as one proceeds deeper into the interior, the scene depicts a lone, not-so-proud hunter trampled underneath a wooly mammoth followed by that unmistakable symbol: a dot topped by a line pointing skyward.

...

The exclamation mark’s first apparent use in writing dates back more than 5,000 years to the Egyptian hieroglyphs adorning the burial chamber in the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza.

The passage preceding what Egyptologists are convinced is the first exclamation mark used in an actual sentence translates roughly as: “It took a lot of work to build this thing!”

... there is evidence that Homer would break off during particularly exciting portions of “The Odyssey” to stand on a round rock and clasp both of his hands together over his head, much as a modern cheerleader will do to signify the letter “I,” in order to approximate an exclamation mark for his audience.

For my part, I'm willing to accept cave paintings as a form of writing. However, the lack of support for this account may indicate it is as fanciful as the account featuring a highly mobile 'io'.

More recently (2 September 2015), a quite evidently well-researched and far from fanciful account by Keith Houston, available in an article titled "The mysterious origins of punctuation" at BBC's Culture site, traces the origins of the exclamation mark and other punctuation marks from a system devised in the 3rd century BCE by an Egyptian librarian named Aristophanes.

Aristophanes' system used three dots:

... aligned with the middle (·), bottom (.) or top (·) of each line. His ‘subordinate’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘full’ points corresponded to the pauses of increasing length that a practised reader would habitually insert between formal units of speech called the comma, colon and periodos. This was not quite punctuation as we know it – Aristophanes saw his marks as representing simple pauses rather than grammatical boundaries – but the seed had been planted.

By Houston's account, Aristophanes' system of dots was abandoned, never having been more than a method of marking pauses, before being resurrected by Christians in the 6th Century:

As it spread across Europe, Christianity embraced writing and rejuvenated punctuation. In the 6th Century, Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning.

The early Christian punctuation was, however, confined to

... decorative letters and paragraph marks (Γ, ¢, 7, ¶ and others)

until, in the 7th Century, Isidore of Seville

rearranged the dots in order of height to indicate short (.), medium (·) and long (·) pauses respectively.

Moreover, Isidore explicitly connected punctuation with meaning for the first time: the re-christened subdistinctio, or low point (.), no longer marked a simple pause but was rather the signpost of a grammatical comma, while the high point, or distinctio finalis (·), stood for the end of a sentence.

Now writers began to embellish the three-dot system:

Some borrowed from musical notation, inspired by Gregorian chants to create new marks like the punctus versus (a medieval ringer for the semicolon used to terminate a sentence) and the punctus elevatus (an upside-down ‘;’ that evolved into the modern colon) that suggested changes in tone as well as grammatical meaning. Another new mark, an ancestor of the question mark called the punctus interrogativus, was used to punctuate questions and to convey a rising inflection at the same time (The related exclamation mark came later, during the 15th Century.)

Having traced these origins, however, Houston glances over any individual account of the exclamation point:

This, then, was the state of punctuation at the height of the Renaissance: a mixture of ancient Greek dots; colons, question marks, and other marks descended from medieval symbols; and a few latecomers such as the slash and dash. ... when printing arrived in the mid-1450s, with the publication of Johannes Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible, punctuation found itself unexpectedly frozen in time. Within 50 years, the majority of the symbols we use today were cast firmly in lead, never to change again: Boncompagno da Signa’s slash dropped to the baseline and gained a slight curve to become the modern comma, inheriting its old Greek name as it did so; the semicolon and the exclamation mark joined the colon and the question mark; and Aristophanes’s dot got one last hurrah as the full stop.

Houston's account is not necessarily at odds with other accounts, but he does seem far less inclined to speculative flights of fancy based on hesitation marks and scribal errors in ancient manuscripts. Additionally, he doesn't pair images of these unerasable and possibly accidental artifacts made on very expensive 'paper' with speculative graphics depicting the 'evolution' of...the question mark?

Evolution of the question mark

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