From where did this sign come from------>?

Answer 1

The (question mark) symbol is generally thought to originate from the Latin quaestio, meaning "question", which was abbreviated to Qo. The uppercase Q was written above the lowercase o, and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol. Another hypothesis about the origin of the question mark proposes that the mark originated in the 9th century, when it appeared as a point followed by the curvy bit written slanted (similar to the tilde, although the tilde was tilted more upward to the right). The point has always indicated the end of a sentence. The curved line represented the intonation pattern of a spoken question, and may be associated with a kind of early musical notation, like neumes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark

Answer 2

The question mark did not come into being until 16th century England where it was derived from the Latin word “quaestio” which is Latin for ' I ask' . It was abbreviated to Qo with the capital Q written on top of the o - the letters taken from the first and last letters of the word ' quaestio' and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol. This is the most accepted theory on the question mark.

How the Q and o became the ? - perhaps the top part of the o (on top of the Q) eventually changed over time into a half O then the end part of the Q was represented by the stick ( the bottom part)- a quicker way of writing Q and o- the dot at the end signifies the end of the sentence.

Answer 3

The arrow sign? I'm guessing back from the days of archery with bows and arrows. An arrow when shot is always pointing in the direction it's moving.

Answer 4

The question mark came from a monk habit of writing the Latin word for question, quo, at the end of sentences.
Over time, the letters were written vertically to save space and morphed into the ? we write today.

Answer 5

The Key Board.

Answer 6

Well, I've used that sign in chemistry and biochemistry class..it's used *in chem anyway* as a form on equals sign

Answer 7

Heaven

Answer 8

"?" redirects here. For the Lost episode, see ? (Lost). For the Question Mark butterfly, see Polygonia interrogationis.
The question mark (also known as an interrogation point, query, or eroteme) is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence. It can also be used mid-sentence to mark a merely interrogative phrase, where it functions similarly to a comma, such as in the single sentence "Where shall we go? and what shall we do?", but this usage is increasingly rare. The question mark is not used for indirect questions.




Convention

Standard question markSome people place a space between the end of their sentence and the question mark. This usage is thought to stem from the French language. In French a space is always placed before question marks, exclamation marks, as well as colons and semicolons (See Ponctuation at French Wikipedia). In English, however, the insertion of this extra blank space is generally considered bad form. The Oxford English Dictionary specifies that no space should precede the question mark. Some English language books may appear to have these spaces. However, on closer inspection they are not full spaces, tending instead to be half to three-quarters the width of a space. These are not considered spaces; instead, this is simply a form of kerning used to make the text less cramped and thus easier to read.

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Origins
The symbol is generally thought to originate from the Latin quaestio, meaning "question", which was abbreviated to Qo. The uppercase Q was written above the lowercase o, and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol. Another hypothesis about the origin of the question mark proposes that the mark originated in the 9th century, when it appeared as a point followed by the curvy bit written slanted (similar to the tilde, although the tilde was tilted more upward to the right). The point has always indicated the end of a sentence. The curved line represented the intonation pattern of a spoken question, and may be associated with a kind of early musical notation, like neumes.

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Variants in other languages and in history

Opening (inverted) and closing question marksIn some languages, such as Spanish and Galician, typography since the 18th century has required opening and closing question marks; an interrogative sentence or phrase begins with an inverted question mark (¿) and ends with the question mark (?) (see more on usage in Spanish.) However, this orthographical convention is often disregarded in quick typing and where the inverted character is not easily available from computer keyboards. In Greek and Church Slavonic, a semicolon (;) is used as a question mark. In Arabic, the question mark "؟" is mirrored. The question mark is also used in modern writing (though not required) in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

The rhetorical question mark first appeared in the 1580s and was used at the end of a rhetorical question. It was the reverse of an ordinary question mark, so that instead of the main opening pointing back into the sentence, it opened away from it. This usage gradually disappeared in the 1600s.

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Computing
In computing, the question mark is represented as a Unicode and ASCII character 63 or 0x003F. It is often utilized as a Wildcard Character - a symbol that can be used to substitute for any other character or characters in a string. In particular "?" is used as a substitute for any one character as opposed to the asterisk (*) which can be used as a substitute for zero or more characters in a string. The inverted question mark corresponds to Unicode character 191 (0x00BF), and can be accessed from the keyboard in Microsoft Windows by pressing AltGr-/ or by holding down the Alt key and typing either 1 6 8 or 0 1 9 1 (depends on ANSI codepage) on the numeric keypad. In GNOME applications, it can be entered by typing the hexadecimal Unicode character while holding ctrl-shift, i.e.: ctrl-shift BF - ¿. In recent XFree86 and X.Org incarnations of the X Window System, it can be accessed as a compose sequence of two straight question marks, i.e. pressing ? ? yields ¿. In the Mac OS, option-shift-? produces an inverted question mark.

The question mark is used in ASCII renderings of the International Phonetic Alphabet, such as SAMPA in place of the glottal stop symbol (which resembles "?" without the dot), and corresponds to Unicode character U+0294 Latin letter glottal stop [ʔ].

In computer programming, the symbol "?" appears in several programming languages. In C "?" is part of the ?: operator, which is used for simple boolean conditions. In C# 2.0, "?" modifier and "??" operator are used to handle nullable data types. In the POSIX syntax for regular expressions, such as the one used in Perl and Python, ? stands for "zero or one instance of the previous subexpression", i.e. an optional element.

In many web browsers, "?" is used to show a character not found in the program's character set. This commonly occurs for apostrophes and quotation marks when they are written with software that uses its own proprietary non-standard code for these characters.

The generic URL (Universal Resource Locator) syntax allows for a query string to be appended to a file name in a web address so that additional information can be passed to a script; the query mark, ?, is used to indicate the start of a query string. A query string is usually made up of a number of different field/value pairs, each separated by the ampersand symbol, &. For example, somewhere.com/login.php?username=test&password=blank.

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Chess
In algebraic chess notation, "?" denotes a bad move, and "??" a blunder. For details see punctuation (chess).

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Mathematics
In mathematics "?" commonly denotes Minkowski's question mark function.

Answer 9

If you are referring to the "------>," it's probably from bathroom signs. You know...mens room, this way ----->

Answer 10

TRAIL MARKING