U+00A1 "¡" Inverted Exclamation Mark Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
¡
U+00A1 "¡" Inverted Exclamation Mark is a punctuation symbol used primarily in Spanish and other Romance languages to mark the beginning of an exclamatory sentence or phrase, where it is paired with the standard exclamation mark at the end. It was added to the Unicode standard in version 1.1 and is part of the Latin-1 Supplement block, originating from the ISO 8859-1 character set. Historically, its use in Spanish was established by the Royal Spanish Academy in the 18th century to provide clear visual cues for intonation in written text, especially in longer sentences, and it is also employed in Galician, Asturian, and occasionally in older or stylized Catalan.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+00A1 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Inverted Exclamation Mark |
| Block | Latin-1 Supplement |
| General Category | Other Punctuation |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Other Neutral |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ¡ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ¡ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xC2 0xA1 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x00A1 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000000A1 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u00a1 |