Exclamation mark

Also called exclamation point or bang.

How to type it

Left pinky with Shift. Introduced in Lesson 24: Punctuation: : ! ?.

Common uses

• An exclamation mark ends a sentence that shows strong feeling, a command, or a shout.
• Interjections and greetings often take one, so Hello! and Stop! read as spoken bursts.

Less common uses

• In mathematics, ! after a number means factorial: 5! is 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1.
• In many programming languages, ! means logical not, and != means not equal.
• Programmers read ! aloud as bang, as in the shebang line #! at the top of a script.
• The interrobang ‽ combines a question mark and an exclamation mark; Martin Speckter proposed it in 1962.