Boustrophedon: from left to right and right to left in alternating lines (from Greek “as an ox turns in plowing”)

Aristophanes, Dionysius Thrax

Komma, kolon, and periodos were initially dots denoting short, medium, and long pauses

C for capitulum (chapters) was filled in with a line in scriptoria, which became the pilcrow

Paragraphos > pelagraphe > pelagreffe > Middle English pylcrafte > pilcrow

Space left for rubricated pilcrow often forgotten about or left blank, leading to indented paragraphs with printing press

Alternatives to interrobang: exclamaquest, interrapoint, exclarogative

Interrobang was slow to appear because type foundries didn’t want to sacrifice an established character for an upstart

Backwards question mark “percontation point” used briefly in 1500s for rhetorical question

lb from Roman “libra” meaning scales or balances

oz from medieval Italian onza, meaning twelfth of Roman pound

lb with tilde/tittle above it (used to show contraction), when written in haste, looked like #; combined with Latin pondo became pound sign

Shebang = # + !, became hash-bang in UNIX

Ampersand started as Pompeian graffiti, later becoming part of the alphabet: “X, Y, Z, and per se (by itself) and.”

@ from tittled a, an abbreviation for the Spanish/Portuguese arroba, a unit of volume and weight

Dagger originally a straight line marking superfluous lines in text, called obelos (Greek “roasting spit”)

Asteriskos (“little star”) for genuine lines in Bible translation; use with dagger meant line that should be elsewhere

Martin Luther’s 95 Theses refuted by Eck’s “Obelisci” which Luther countered with “Asterisci”; Eck wanted to show Luther’s arguments to be false (to obelize them), while Luther’s “asterisks” highlighted defects in reasoning

Glosses: notes in margin and between lines

Scribes started using double virgules (//) to mark where a pilcrow should be, but they were often ignored so they just marked pauses

Em dash used to censor names or curses, and Dash became its own epithet

Exclamation points on early typewriters were made with a period and apostrophe

Commash (,—) and semicolash (:—)

Double hyphen instead of dash was standard on typewriters and became so in comics