An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke. Overly frequent use of the exclamation mark is generally considered poor writing, as it distracts the reader and decreases the mark's significance. This can be in protest or astonishment ("Out of all places, the squatter-camp?!") a few writers replace this with a single, nonstandard punctuation mark, the interrobang, which is the combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark. The exclamation mark is sometimes used in conjunction with the question mark. Informally, exclamation marks may be repeated for additional emphasis ("That's great!!!"), but this practice is generally considered unacceptable in formal prose.
It has also been adopted in languages written in other scripts, such as languages written with Cyrillic or Arabic scripts, Chinese characters, and Devanagari.Ī sentence ending in an exclamation mark may represent an exclamation or an interjection (such as "Wow!", "Boo!"), or an imperative ("Stop!"), or may indicate astonishment or surprise: "They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" Exclamation marks are occasionally placed mid-sentence with a function similar to a comma, for dramatic effect, although this usage is obsolete: "On the walk, oh! there was a frightful noise." The exclamation mark is common to languages using the Latin alphabet, although usage varies slightly between languages.
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For example, the password communicated in the spoken phrase “Your password is em-zero-pee-aitch-bang-en-three” (“em-nought-pee-aitch-pling-en-three” in Commonwealth Hackish) is m0ph!n3. In hacker culture, the exclamation mark is called “bang”, “shriek”, or, in the British slang known as Commonwealth Hackish, “pling”. In the printing world, the exclamation mark can be called a screamer, a gasper, a slammer, or a startler. This “bang” usage is behind the names of the interrobang, an unconventional typographic character, and a shebang, a feature of Unix computer systems.
In the 1950s, secretarial dictation and typesetting manuals in America referred to the mark as “bang”, perhaps from comic books – where the ! appeared in dialogue balloons to represent a gun being fired, although the nickname probably emerged from letterpress printing. Now obsolete, the name ecphoneme was documented in the early 20th century.
Slang and other names for the exclamation mark That is why the exclamation point is usually shift+1 as both were added at the same time. Such typewriters often lacked a '1' key as well (the user typed a lower-case 'L').
Instead the user typed a full stop and then backspaced and overtyped an apostrophe. Many pre-computer age typewriters did not have the exclamation mark. The exclamation mark was first introduced into English printing in the 15th century to show emphasis, and was called the "sign of admiration or exclamation" or the "note of admiration" until the mid-17th century "admiration" referred to that word's Latin-language sense, of wonderment. Over time, the i moved above the o that o first became smaller, and (with time) a dot. One theory of its origin posits derivation from a Latin exclamation of joy, namely io, analogous to "hurray" the modern graphical representation is believed to have originated in the Middle Ages medieval copyists wrote the Latin word io at the end of a sentence, to indicate expression of joy. Graphically, the exclamation mark is represented by variations on the theme of a full stop point with a vertical line above.