punctuation - Is there a standard ordering for the question mark and the exclamation mark used together?


We've all wanted to express certain questions, rhetorical or not, with annoyance, excitement, surprise, frustration and so on. What better way than with both a question mark (?) and an exclamation mark (!), right?


I've seen two ways of punctuating such questions:



Where is this place?!




Who do you think you are!?



(Things like ?!?, !?!, ?????!!!!!, ??!?!!?!?!!??, etc are irrelevant here.)


Which is the proper way to order the two symbols? Or does each of the above two have a distinct and grammatically correct meaning?


Or is the interrobang (‽) the clear winner here? ;)



Answer



I think if you ask the experts who would claim that they know what the “correct” way to punctuate something is, they would tell you that a sentence may only have one terminal punctuation mark—that is to say, neither “?!” nor “!?” is correct.


So, no matter what order you use, you’ll never please those people. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 3742 examples of “?!” and 1197 examples of “!?”. Clearly both orderings enjoy substantial usage, although it does appear that “?!” enjoys a majority of usage, probably because most sentences that get the double punctuation treatment are syntactically questions that have an exclamation point added for emphasis.


Edit: I checked in the British National Corpus, and it has 224 instances of “?!” and 121 instances of “!?”.


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