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Symbolic Language Trivia Quiz
The symbols are familiar. Their names may not be. Put your knowledge to the test as you identify ten symbols hidden in plain sight throughout everyday writing.
Last 3 plays: spanishliz (10/10), Reamar42 (7/10), xchasbox (10/10).
Writers and printers have long relied on a cast of special marks to help convey meaning. Some are familiar companions, like the symbol that joins "fish & chips", whose formal name is . Others are less common, such as the mark that combines surprise and curiosity into a single character known as the . Can you believe it‽
A few symbols quietly guide readers through text. Sometimes a sentence doesn't quite come to a complete stop... and that sequence of dots is called an . Hidden from most readers, the ¶ often appears in editing software whenever paragraph marks are displayed. Its proper name is . When a word has been accidentally left out, an editor can use a ^ to indicate where it belongs, a mark known as a . A reader opening a French novel might encounter « Bonjour » instead of quotation marks. These angled marks are called .
Other symbols serve specialized roles. Most students recognize ÷ as the division sign, but its proper name is . Millions of people type #ThrowbackThursday without realizing that the symbol leading the phrase is traditionally called an .
Several symbols appear so often that we scarcely notice them. Whether separating dates like 10/12/2026 or presenting choices such as yes/no, the forward slash is known as a . If someone says a journey is ~100 kilometres long, they've used a to show the distance is only approximate.
These are just a few members of a much larger family of symbols. Many more are hiding in books, keyboards, websites, and equations, quietly doing their jobs while most of us never learn their names.
Many of the symbols we use every day have histories far older than the keyboards on which we type them.
The ampersand (&) began as a stylized version of the Latin word et, meaning "and." As scribes wrote the two letters together more quickly, they gradually fused into the symbol we recognize today. Its name comes from generations of schoolchildren reciting the character as "&, per se and" a phrase that eventually became "ampersand."
The interrobang (‽) is a much newer invention. In 1962, advertising executive Martin Speckter proposed a single punctuation mark that could express both a question and an exclamation. Although it never gained widespread acceptance, it remains a favorite among typography enthusiasts.
Derived from a Greek word meaning "omission," the ellipsis (...) originally served a practical editorial purpose, showing that words had been left out of a quotation. Over time, writers adopted it for literary effect as well.
The pilcrow (¶) dates back to medieval manuscripts, where it marked the beginning of a new paragraph. Long before blank lines became common, scribes relied on symbols such as this one to help organize lengthy texts.
The name caret (^) comes from the Latin "caret", meaning "it lacks." Proofreaders used the mark to indicate that something was missing from a manuscript and needed to be inserted.
Those angled quotation marks known as guillemets (« ») are named after the sixteenth-century French printer Guillaume Le Bé, who helped popularize their use. They remain standard quotation marks in many languages today.
The obelus (÷) has surprisingly ancient roots. Variations of the symbol were used by Greek scholars to mark passages they considered doubtful or noteworthy long before the sign acquired its mathematical meaning.
Few names are as mysterious as octothorpe (#). While the symbol itself has existed for centuries, nobody is entirely certain how its modern name originated. Most theories point to Bell Laboratories engineers in the 1960s, but part of the story remains unresolved.
The name solidus (/) is linked to the Roman solidus, a gold coin of the late Roman Empire, and it was used in accounting and currency, separating denominations. The solidus was not originally called a "forward slash" at all. For centuries it was known by names such as virgule and oblique stroke. The word forward was only added in the computer age to distinguish it from the backslash (\), making "forward slash" an example of a retronym.
Finally, the tilde (~) traces its ancestry to medieval scribes, who used small marks above letters to indicate omitted characters and save valuable space on handwritten pages. From that practical shortcut grew one of the most versatile symbols in modern writing.
This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor looney_tunes before going online.
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