joy, namely io, similar to "hooray". Writers would write io at the end of sentences to show happiness. Over time, these writers made a set of changes to io, such as placing the "I" above the "O", and making the "O" smaller until it turned into a dot. This set of changes turned io to the exclamation mark.

The exclamation mark comes from the mid-14th century, when the writer Iacopo Alpoleio da Urbisaglia made it. The linguist Florence Hazrat says he "was really annoyed" that people read emotional text with no