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punctus percontativus

punctus percontativus noun: a reversed question mark (⸮), visually almost identical to the Arabic question mark (؟ (?)), used to mark the end of a percontative statement.

Noun

punctus percontativus

  1. A reversed question mark (⸮), visually almost identical to the Arabic question mark (؟ (?)), used to mark the end of a percontative statement.
    • punctus percontativus A reversed, but not inverted punctus interrogativus […] used in the 16th and 17th centuries to indicate the end of a percontatio.1993, Malcolm Beckwith Parkes, Pause and Effect, glossary, pages 306-307
    • These include Middleton’s […] idiosyncratic placing of apostrophes and deployment of punctuation marks — exclamation marks, question marks and a form of reversed question mark which Malcolm Parkes classifies as “punctus percontativus,” associated […] with rhetorical questions.1995, Julia Briggs, “‘The Lady Vanishes’: Problems of Authorship and Editing in the Middleton Canon” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society II: 1992–1996...

Origin of punctus percontativus

Latin: punctus (“point”) + percontativus (“percontative”) = “percontative point”

Questions about punctus percontativus

What does punctus percontativus mean?
Punctus percontativus means a reversed question mark (⸮), visually almost identical to the Arabic question mark (؟ (?)), used to mark the end of a percontative statement.
What part of speech is punctus percontativus?
Punctus percontativus is a noun.

Words near punctus percontativus in the dictionary

  1. punctus
  2. punctus circumflexus
  3. punctus elevatus
  4. punctus flexus
  5. punctus interrogativus
  6. punctus percontativus
  7. punctus versus
  8. pund
  9. Punda
  10. Pundarīka
  11. pundeh

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: punctus percontativus (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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