Several writers and inventors in the last century tried to introduce new marks of punctuation into the English language – but they all failed. Keith Houston tells their story. In the 1930s and ’40s, ...

Every now and then, a random punctuation mark or emoticon will pop up and take over the Internet. The latest one is a little-known symbol called an interrobang that is super easy to start using every ...

Glyphs are the hidden heroes of the typography world. You might not pay them much attention, but they’re undeniably important. Glyphs—and by glyphs we’re referring specifically to those little ...

We all know how important punctuation marks are in our scripts, because punctuation fills our writing with expression. We pause, stop, emphasise, or question using a comma, a period, an exclamation ...

The following is the first of three excerpts from Keith Houston’s new book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. The orthographic world of ancient ...