U+00BF "¿" Inverted Question Mark Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
¿
U+00BF "¿" Inverted Question Mark is a punctuation mark primarily used in Spanish and other languages that follow Spanish conventions, such as Galician and Asturian, to indicate the beginning of a question. It is placed at the start of an interrogative sentence or clause, complementing the standard question mark at the end, to help readers anticipate the tone and structure of the query from the outset. The character was first introduced into the Unicode standard in version 1.1, originating from the ISO 8859 1 Latin 1 encoding, and it serves as a distinctive feature of Spanish orthography, distinguishing it from many other languages that rely solely on a concluding question mark.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+00BF |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Inverted Question 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 0xBF |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x00BF |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000000BF |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u00bf |