How to type Inverted Question Mark
To type Inverted Question Mark (¿), press Alt + 0191 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + Shift + ? on Mac, or write ¿ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00BF directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00bf on Linux, or 00bf then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Inverted Question Mark
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00BF
- Windows
- Alt + 0191
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0191 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + Shift + ? | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ¿ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00BF | INVERTED QUESTION MARK |
Symbols related to Inverted Question Mark
The Unicode code chart points from ¿ to ?, and the rest are filed under inverted in CLDR, the keyword list Unicode publishes alongside the names.
Other punctuation symbols
¿ lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Po, a punctuation mark.
What Inverted Question Mark is used for
¿ belongs in prose rather than in an equation. LaTeX writes it \textquestiondown, a text command, and there is no maths command for it at all: it is a sign that gets written down, not an operator that acts on anything. Putting it inside $...$ is how it comes out looking wrong.
What Unicode says about Inverted Question Mark
The standard recognises ¿ under another name as well: turned question mark. That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
Unicode annotates ¿ directly. Against U+00BF the code chart carries the note “Spanish”. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.
The code chart points from ¿ to Question Mark, inverted interrobang (U+2E18) and reversed question mark (U+2E2E). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Inverted Question Mark looks nearly right but not quite.
How Inverted Question Mark behaves in software
¿ is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
What people ask about Inverted Question Mark
What does inverted v mean in math?
¿ is INVERTED QUESTION MARK, encoded at U+00BF. The Unicode code chart annotates it “Spanish”, which is the standard's own statement of what it is for. It is distinct from question mark (U+003F) and inverted interrobang (U+2E18), which the chart lists beside it precisely because they are confused for one another.
Every way to write Inverted Question Mark
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00BF |
| Decimal | 191 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C2 BF |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 BF |
| HTML entity | ¿ |
| HTML numeric | ¿ or ¿ |
| CSS | \00BF |
| JavaScript | \u00BF |
| Python | \u00BF |
| URL-encoded | %C2%BF |
| LaTeX, in prose | \textquestiondown |
| SVG | 00BF.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ¿ arrives as ¿
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C2 BF are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00BF.