Quaestio non disputata…

What is the etymology of the question mark ? It’s hard to imagine life without it, but, of course, there was a time when this useful punctuation was not available. Medieval scribes indicated a question by adding the interrogative quaestio to the end of what otherwise would have been a declarative sentence. It is widely believed that before the Renaissance invention of the upper and lower case, the repetitive writing of quaestio led to an abbreviated Qo, which then led to a stylized Q with a dot underneath.