The Greek Question

19 June 2025   276 words   ~2 mins
#unicode #text #html

I admit I have a certain bias towards programming languages that use a semicolon as statement terminator (or separator). And because I’m like this, you can imagine how delighted I was to learn about this: behold, THE GREEK QUESTION MARK: “;”.

UnicodeDescriptionExample
U+003BSemicolon;
U+037EGreek Question Mark;

According to Wikipedia1, the Greek question mark (ερωτηματικό, romanized: erōtīmatikó) appeared around the same time as the Latin one, in the 8th century.2 It was adopted by Church Slavonic and eventually settled on a form essentially similar to the Latin semicolon. In Unicode, it is separately encoded as U+037E, but the similarity is so great that the code point is normalised to U+003B, making the marks identical in practice.3

But why stop there?

UnicodeDescriptionExample
U+FE14Presentation Form For Vertical Semicolon;
U+FE54Small Semicolon﹔
U+FF1BFullwidth Semicolon；

Sadly, there does not seem to be a Greek character unique to the exclamation mark; In Modern Greek, the exclamation mark (Θαυμαστικό, thavmastikó) has been introduced from Latin scripts and is used identically4.

But of course there are some potential impersonators of the “!” (U+0021).

UnicodeDescriptionExample
U+FE15Presentation Form For Vertical Exclamation Mark︕
U+FE57Small Exclamation Mark﹗

Εβίβα!

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark ↩︎

  2. Wikipedia Thompson, Edward Maunde (1912). An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaiography. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 60 ff. Retrieved December 10, 2017 – via Internet Archive. ↩︎

  3. Wikipedia Nicolas, Nick (November 20, 2014). “Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation”. Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A Digital Library of Greek Literature. University of California, Irvine. Archived from the original on January 18, 2015.". 2005. Accessed 7 October 2014. ↩︎

  4. Wikipedia Nicolas, Nick. “Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation”. 2005. ↩︎

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