Punctuation
The question mark in braille
Question mark is dots 2, 3 and 6 — a single cell.
2-3-6
One cell — question mark
How to recognise it
Dots 2, 3 and 6 — the same cell as the opening quotation mark, which is a genuine ambiguity in the code rather than an error in this table.
It is the letter h moved down a row
Take the cell for h and slide every dot down one position — dot 1 becomes dot 2, dot 4 becomes dot 5 — and you have the question 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.
It shares a cell with the opening quotation mark
The question mark and the opening double quote are the same cell in Unified English Braille. Readers resolve it from context — a question mark ends a sentence, an opening quote starts a quotation — and this is a real ambiguity in the code, not an error in the table. It is also why automatic braille-to-text decoding cannot be perfectly reliable: the decoder picks the question mark, because in isolation that is the commoner reading. The closing quote, dots 3-5-6, is unambiguous.
In a sentence
Here is the question mark doing its job, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.
Can you read this?
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.
| Cell | Mark | Dots |
|---|---|---|
| Semicolon | 2-3 | |
| Hyphen | 3-6 |