A question mark, also known as an interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism, is a punctuation mark used to indicate that a sentence is a question. In many languages, the question mark? (also known as an interrogation point, query, or eroteme) is used to denote an interrogative clause or phrase. In Armenian, the question mark takes the form of an open circle and is placed above the last vowel of the question word. It is defined in Unicode as +055E ARMENIAN QUESTION MARK. The question mark is also used in ASCII versions of the International Phonetic Alphabet, such as SAMPA, instead of the glottal stop symbol (which looks like? without the dot) and corresponds to the Unicode code point +0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTAL DOT STOP.
In linear logic, the question mark indicates one of the exponential modalities that control weakening and contraction. The use of the question mark can be traced back centuries, when book production was rationalized by assigning punctuation specifically to interrogatives. At that time, the line was more curved and can be easily recognized as the modern question mark. Galician also uses the inverted initial question mark, though usually only in long sentences or in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous. In grammar, a question is a type of sentence expressed in a form that requires (or seems to require) an answer. In Unicode, it is coded separately as U+037E GREEK QUESTION MARK, but the similarity is so great that the code point is normalized to U+003B semicolon, making the marks identical in practice.