Irony punctuation is any form of notation proposed or used to denote verbal irony in written text. Due to the common co-occurrence or conflation of irony with sarcasm, at least some of these are sarcasm punctuation. Written text, in English and other languages, lacks a standard way to mark irony, and several forms of punctuation have been proposed to fill the gap.
Specific irony marks have been proposed (sometimes as jokes, sometimes seriously), such as in the form of an open upward arrow (), used by Marcellin Jobard in the 19th century, and in a form resembling a reversed question mark (), proposed by French poet Alcanter de Brahm during the 19th century.
Irony punctuation is primarily used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. A bracketed exclamation point or question mark as well as scare quotes are also occasionally used to express irony or sarcasm.
Marcellin Jobard's 1841 article using an irony point.
In an article dated 11 October 1841, Marcellin Jobard, a Belgian newspaper publisher, introduced an "irony mark" (French: point d'ironie) in the shape of a raised oversized arrow head with small stem (), rather like an ideogram of a Christmas tree.[4][5] The next year he expanded his idea, suggesting the symbol could be used in various orientations (on its side, upside down, etc.) to mark "a point of irritation, an indignation point, a point of hesitation".[6][7]
Ambrose Bierce's "snigger point", as published in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce[8]
It is written thus ◡ and represents, as nearly as may be, a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence; or, without the stop, to every jocular or ironical clause of a sentence otherwise serious—thus: "Mr. Edward Bok is the noblest work of God ◡." "Our respected and esteemed ◡ contemporary, Mr. Slyvester Vierick, whom for his virtues we revere and for his success envy ◡, is going to the devil as fast as his two heels can carry him." "Deacon Harvey, a truly good man ◡, is self-made in the largest sense of the term; for although he was born great, wise and rich, the deflection of his nose is the work of his own coat-sleeve."
Another irony point (French: point d'ironie) was proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (alias, Marcel Bernhardt) in his 1899 book L'ostensoir des ironies to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level (irony, sarcasm, etc.). It is illustrated by a glyph resembling, but not identical to, a small, elevated, backward-facing question mark.
Hervé Bazin, in his essay "Plumons l'Oiseau" ("Let's pluck the bird", 1966), used the Greek letter ψ with a dot below for the same purpose ().[16] In the same work, the author proposed five other innovative punctuation marks: the "doubt point" (), "conviction point" (), "acclamation point" (), "authority point" (), and "love point" ().[17]
In March 2007, the Dutch foundation CPNB (Collectieve Propaganda van het Nederlandse Boek) presented another design of an irony mark, the ironieteken: ().[18][19] This resembles a lightning bolt symbol or zig-zag with two kinks going down and slightly to the left where it terminates before a dot (like an exclamation mark or question mark have). It is somewhat akin to a punctus interrogativus except much more vertically upright.
Alcanter de Brahm 1899
Hervé Bazin 1966
CPBN proposal 2007
Marcellin Jorbard 1886
Reverse italics (Sartalics)
Tom Driberg recommended that ironic statements be printed in leftward-slanting italics, which he also called sartalics, to distinguish irony from the emphasis indicated by conventional rightward-slanting italics.[20][21]
Scare quotes are a particular use of quotation marks. They are placed around a word or phrase to indicate that it is not used in the fashion that the writer would personally use it. In contrast to the nominal typographic purpose of quotation marks, the enclosed words are not necessarily quoted from another source. When read aloud, various techniques are used to convey the sense, such as prepending the addition of "so-called" or a similar word or phrase of disdain, using a sarcastic or mocking tone, or using air quotes, or any combination of the above.
"/s" redirects here. For further information, see tone indicator.
It is common in online conversation among some Internet users to use a fictitious closing tag patterned after HTML: </sarcasm>. Over time, it has evolved to lose the angle brackets (/sarcasm) and has subsequently been shortened to /sarc or /s[25] (not to be confused with the valid HTML end tag </s> used to end a struck-through passage).[25] Users of the website Reddit frequently denote sarcasm through the use of /s, as shorthand.[26][25] This usage later evolved into tone indicators.
Brackets
Rhetorical questions in some informal situations can use a bracketed question mark, e.g., "Oh, really[?]". The equivalent for an ironic or sarcastic statement would be a bracketed exclamation mark, e.g., "Oh, really[!]". Subtitles, such as in Teletext, sometimes use an exclamation mark within parentheses, (!), to mark sarcasm.[27]
Another method of expressing sarcasm (or, perhaps, irony) is by using tildes (~).
For example, a "fanpost" on the sports blog Card Chronicle described its community culture of using the tilde for this purpose thusly:[28]
'~' – This one character maybe the most important here at CC. Quite simply it means don't take what is said before the symbol too seriously. This is our sarcasm marker
One convention for doing this is by placing the mark adjacent to the punctuation. This allows for easy use with any keyboard, as well as variation. Variations include dry sarcasm (~.), enthusiastic sarcasm (~!), and sarcastic questions (~?). This convention been adopted by the Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree community.[29]
In another convention, perhaps first proposed in 2001 by blogger Tara Liloia, the tilde replaces the punctuation mark:[30][31]
What I propose is on a much grander scale. The sarcasm mark would be appended to the end of any sentence that was meant sarcastically. Think of all of the different places where the sarcasm mark is applicable! Why, The Onion alone would use hundreds of sarcasm marks each day. Man, the Onion is one great newspaper~ Did you catch that? It was a test sarcasm mark—it worked, didn't it? You knew I was being sarcastic. I'm telling you, 10 years from now when the sarcasm mark is in the dictionary, you'll thank me.
In another convention, perhaps first proposed by typographer Choz Cunningham in 2006, the tilde is placed after the period.[30][32][33] Cunningham called this a snark[30][32] and it is sometimes referred to as a snark mark.[34][35][33] Cunningham suggested that font designers should make .~ a ligature that placed the tilde above the period.[30][32][36]
In another convention, the sarcastic remark is surrounded by tildes, ~like so~. See Tilde §As expressive punctuation for more information on the various shades of meaning tilde punctuation can possess.
Sarcastrophes
In the early 2010s, some internet users advocated the convention of surrounding sarcastic or ironic comments in carets, ^like so^.[37][38] In this use, these carets were referred to as sarcastrophes,[37][38] a portmanteau of sarcasm and apostrophes (to which they bear a small amount of visual resemblance).
Typing in all-capital letters, using a Twitter-style hashtag, #sarcasm, or emoticons like "Rolling eyes" (), ":>", and ":P / , are used by some in instant messaging. Some might use the "victory hand" dingbat / emoji () character to simulate "scare quotes".[40]
The upside-down face emoji () is often used to convey sarcasm.[41] However, it can also be understood to indicate a variety of subtle or concealed emotions. These can include annoyance, indignation, panic, mockery, and other more ambiguous feelings.[42][43]
In many gaming communities, the word "Kappa" is frequently used to display sarcasm as well as joking intent. This is due to the "Kappa" emote on Twitch, a livestreaming site, where it has gained popularity for such purpose.[44] The emote is a black-and-white picture of the face of Josh DeSeno (then-employee of Justin.tv) making a mercurial, subtly smirking expression (which he has claimed was "just a feigned smile"). It is named after the Japanese yokai of the same name.[44]
CollegeHumor jokingly proposed new marks called "sarcastises" which resemble ragged, or zig-zagged parentheses, used to enclose sarcastic remarks.[45]
A "SarcMark" symbol, which resembles a spiral enclosing a period, requiring custom computer font software was proposed in 2010.[46] This proposal was subsequently criticized boisterously in an "Open Sarcasm Manifesto" published on the web.[47][48]
See also
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Irony marks.
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The text is available in transcribed form in . The choice of U+25E1◡LOWER HALF CIRCLE is one Unicode typographical approximation for the mark; U+203F‿UNDERTIE would also be a plausible approximation, as would an open parenthesis rotated in CSS:(
The meandering path toward the modern emoticon continued in 1887, when the celebrated (and feared) critic Ambrose Bierce penned a tongue-in-cheek essay on writing reform entitled "For Brevity and Clarity." Alongside helpful contractions of phrases such as "much esteemed by all who knew him" (mestewed), Bierce presented a new mark of punctuation intended to help less fortunate writers convey humor or irony, which he called "the snigger point, or note of cachinnation". (Now almost extinct, "cachinnation" means "loud or immoderate laughter".) It looked like a line with the ends turned up and, he wrote, "represents, as nearly as may be, a smiling mouth". Of course, his proposal was itself an ironic act, and unsurprisingly, the mark didn't catch on.
In 1912, the writer Ambrose Bierce proposed a new punctuation device called a "snigger point", a smiling face represented by \__/!, to connote jocularity.
This 1912 appears to refer to the publication of the collection The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, not the original essay publication date. \__/! appears to be a typographic approximation in ASCII characters for what this page would represent here as ◡!
The snigger point, or note of cachinnation, was invented by Ambrose Bierce in 1887. He proposed the new typographic symbol as "an improvement in punctuation", explaining in an essay that "it [...] represents, as nearly as may be, a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence; or, without the stop, to every jocular or ironical clause of a sentence otherwise serious." Recommended to humorless colleagues who had no trouble recognizing his sarcasm, the snigger point, or note of cachinnation, never caught on.
↑"Nieuw: een leesteken voor ironie" (in Dutch). Stichting Collectieve Propaganda van het Nederlandse Boek (CPNB). 13 March 2007. Archived from the original on 3 October 2008. Retrieved 15 September 2012.
123Khodak, Mikhail; Saunshi, Nikunj; Vodrahalli, Kiran (7–12 May 2018). "A Large Self-Annotated Corpus for Sarcasm"(PDF). Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference: 1. arXiv:1704.05579. Bibcode:2017arXiv170405579K. Archived(PDF) from the original on 9 February 2019. Retrieved 8 February 2019. Reddit users have adopted a common method for sarcasm annotation consisting of adding the marker '/s' to the end of sarcastic statements; this originates from the HTML text delineation <sarcasm>...</sarcasm>. [...] '/s' has other connotations: For instance, in HTML, <s>...</s> denotes a strike-through. Therefore a subreddit focusing on the discussion of web programming, for example, might include instances where '/s' is used with a different meaning.
↑"Community Guidelines§A few things to consider". MLND Wiki. 14 August 2017. Archived from the original on 20 January 2021. Retrieved 14 August 2017– via GitHub. Should the need arise (as it so often does) to say something sarcastic, use official sarcasm punctuation ~. for dry sarcasm. ~! for enthusiastic sarcasm. And ~? for sarcastic/rhetorical questions
1234Houston, Keith (9 October 2011). "Irony & Sarcasm marks, part 3 of 3". Shady Characters. Retrieved 7 April 2026. (this is largely equivalent to the printed book also mentioned on this page)
↑"Mocking SpongeBob". Know Your Meme. 9 May 2017. Archived from the original on 5 November 2019. Retrieved 27 October 2019.
↑Kunneman, Florian; Liebrecht, Christine; van Mulken, Margot; van den Bosch, Antal (July 2015). "Signaling sarcasm: From hyperbole to hashtag". Information Processing & Management. 51 (4): 500–509. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2014.07.006. hdl:2066/148844.
Houston, Keith (2013). Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. ISBN978-0-393-06442-1.
"Irony & Sarcasm Marks", a series of posts from Keith Houston, the author of Shady Characters, is a more comprehensive examination of proposed irony marks
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