The interrobang is one of the few punctuation marks with a known inventor, a known birth year and a name its readers argued over.
Martin K. Speckter ran his own New York advertising agency. He was also a keen amateur typographer who edited Type Talks, the journal of the Advertising Typographers Association of America. His target was the excited or disbelieving question. Writers had to type two marks for it, as in "You did what?!"
In the March-April 1962 issue, Speckter proposed a single mark to do both jobs. The art director Jack Lipton drew trial designs. Speckter floated two names, "exclamaquest" and "interrobang." The second won.
The name has two halves. Interro- comes from "interrogation point," an older name for the question mark that Merriam-Webster dates to about 1864. Speckter traced it to Latin interrogatio. "Bang" was slang for the exclamation point. Sources tell the naming slightly differently. The punctuation history site Shady Characters says Speckter proposed it himself. Wordsmith.org says he chose it from readers' suggestions.
Readers certainly sent in alternatives. A May-June follow-up listed "emphaquest," "interrapoint," "exclarogative," "rhet" and "consternation mark." The design that stuck was the simplest: a question mark and an exclamation point printed on top of each other, ‽.
The press played along. The Wall Street Journal, one of Speckter's clients, ran an editorial about the mark on April 6, 1962. A New York Herald Tribune columnist hailed it on April 1, a date that made some readers suspect a prank.
For a few years the mark looked set to spread. In 1966 the designer Richard Isbell included an "interabang" in the Americana typeface for American Type Founders. In 1968 Remington Rand offered it on its Model 25 electric typewriters.
It never replaced the habit of typing ?! by hand. But the name has outlived the fad. It is still the standard word for the mark. There is even an inverted form, ⸘, suited to opening a phrase in Spanish.