Who first started to annotate chess moves with “!” for good & “?” for bad?! EDIT: I had a look in the 1895 Hastings Chess Tournament Book, where the 22 players annotated one another's games. Plenty of exclamation marks, modestly encased in brackets. There are no question marks (perhaps that would have been thought rude). But typically the exclam is the answer to an inferior move discussed in a footnote, for example in Schiffers' annotations of Alvin vs Bird (Aug 5th) p 23: > 34 R x Kt P[8] P x P (!) > > [8] He ought to have played P x P, Q x P ; 35. Q B to B sq, &c. However I see in the comments this is not our earliest sighting of "!", which Noam Elkies has traced to 1887.