Exclamation mark

"!" redirects here. For other uses, see ! (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with I.

An exclamation mark.

An exclamation mark (!) is a punctuation mark. It is used to show strong emotion at the end of a sentence or after an interjection.^[1]

History

The exclamation mark is made by putting a vertical line over a period. It is thought that it came from the Latin exclamation io, which shows joy. Over time, the I got put above the o and later the o became a dot.

Uses

In coding, "!" sometimes means not. In mathematics, the use of an exclamation mark can be used for the factorial function (for example, ${\displaystyle n!}$).^[2][3][4]

Related pages

For the page about what Wikipedia is not, see Wikipedia:!

• Ampersand
• Interjection
• Punctuation
• Question mark
• Quotation mark

References

1. "Exclamation Point (or Exclamation Mark)". Grammarly. 2016-02-09. Retrieved 2020-10-17.
2. "Compendium of Mathematical Symbols". Math Vault. 2020-03-01. Retrieved 2020-09-10.
3. "Factorial Function !". www.mathsisfun.com. Retrieved 2020-09-10.
4. Weisstein, Eric W. "Factorial". mathworld.wolfram.com. Retrieved 2020-09-10.