The exclamation mark in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 2, 3 and 5.

It is the letter f moved down a row

Take the cell for f and slide every dot down one position — dot 1 becomes dot 2, dot 4 becomes dot 5 — and you have the exclamation mark. Six of the eight single-cell marks were built this way, which means a reader who knows the first ten letters already knows the shapes and only has to remember they sit lower in the cell.

In a sentence

Here is the exclamation mark doing its job, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.

Watch out!

Try your own text in the translator, or paste braille into the decoder to read it back.

Marks it is confused with

These differ by a single dot. Punctuation is harder to tell apart than letters because the marks are small and sit low in the cell, so a missing dot is easy to miss.