Question mark ???

India
August 17, 2010 2:32pm CST
How come the symbol "?" stands for question mark...it could've been any other symbols like "#" or "$" or "&" or even "!".But why "?"...any comments ? :)
4 responses
@lulu1220 (1006)
• United States
17 Aug 10
This is what I found out when I researched this....When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio – meaning "question" – at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem – readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.
@mythociate (21437)
• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
2 Mar 13
The same way lots of words come to mean what they do. The words "It gets better," "out," "g@y" and "f@g" all originally meant 'life changes, but you get used to it,' 'not inside,' 'so happy that you just don't care' & 'an armful of firewood' (and I'm sure there were other meanings before that ) Now those words mean ... offensive things (so offensive I had to change them to get past the auto-filter). Why did they change? Because people used them differently, other people picked up- & used the new meanings, and the new meanings stick (as long as people continue to use them).
• India
17 Aug 10
yes it could be any thing but when this symbol came into existence it was meant for question mark and all other symbols came into exist with their own meaning.
• United States
17 Aug 10
It is the sign's destiny to be the question mark. That is what I think because if "#" was the question mark then this sign destined to be the question mark.
@thebest1 (658)
• Romania
17 Aug 10
Because the sign "$" gives safety,not makes you to ask questions...ha ha ha