Quotation mark


Quotation marks, also known as quotes, quote marks, speech marks, inverted commas, or talking marks, are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to set off direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character.
Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.

History

The single quotation mark is traced to Ancient Greek practice, adopted and adapted by monastic copyists. In his seventh century encyclopedia, The Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville describes their use of the Greek diplé " ⟩ Diplé: our copyists place this sign in the books of the people of the Church, to separate or to indicate the quotations drawn from the Holy Scriptures".
The double quotation mark derives from a marginal notation used in fifteenth-century manuscript annotations to indicate a passage of particular importance ; the notation was placed in the outside margin of the page and was repeated alongside each line of the passage. In his edition of the works of Aristotle, which appeared in 1483 or 1484, the Milanese Renaissance humanist Francesco Filelfo marked literal and appropriate quotes with oblique double dashes on the left margin of each line. Until then, literal quotations had been highlighted or not at the author's discretion. Non-verbal loans were marked on the edge. After the publication of Filelfo's edition, the quotation marks for literal quotations prevailed. During the seventeenth century this treatment became specific to quoted material, and it grew common, especially in Britain, to print quotation marks at the beginning and end of the quotation as well as in the margin; the French usage is a remnant of this. In most other languages, including English, the marginal marks dropped out of use in the last years of the eighteenth century. The usage of a pair of marks, opening and closing, at the level of lower case letters was generalized.
in Bulletin de l’Agence générale des colonies, No. 302, May 1934, showing the usage of a pair of marks, opening and closing, at the level of lower case letters.
By the nineteenth century, the design and usage began to be specific within each region. In Western Europe the custom became to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity pointing outward. In Britain those marks were elevated to the same height as the top of capital letters:.
In France, by the end of the nineteenth century, the marks were modified to an angular shape:. Some authors claim that the reason for this was a practical one, in order to get a character that was clearly distinguishable from the apostrophes, the commas and the parentheses. Also, in other scripts, the angular quotation marks are distinguishable from other punctuation characters—the Greek breathing marks, the Armenian emphasis and apostrophe, the Arabic comma, decimal separator, thousands separator, etc. Other authors claim that the reason for this was an aesthetic one. The elevated quotation marks created an extra white space before and after the word that was considered aesthetically unpleasing, while the in-line quotation marks helped to maintain the typographical color, since the quotation marks had the same height and were aligned with the lower case letters. Nevertheless, while other languages do not insert a space between the quotation marks and the word, the French usage does insert them, even if it is a narrow space.
The curved quotation marks usage,, was exported to some non-Latin scripts, notably where there was some English influence, for instance in Native American scripts and Indic scripts. On the other hand, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Ethiopic adopted the French 'angular' quotation marks,. The Far East angle bracket quotation marks,, are also a development of the in-line angular quotation marks.
In Central Europe, however, the practice was to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity pointing inward. The German tradition preferred the curved quotation marks, the first one at the level of the commas, the second one at the level of the apostrophes:. Alternatively, these marks could be angular and in-line with lower case letters, but still pointing inward:. Some neighboring regions adopted the German curved marks tradition with lower–upper alignment, while others made up a variant with the closing mark pointing rightward like the opening one,.
Sweden choose a convention where both marks equally pointed to the right but lined up both at the top level:.
In Eastern Europe there was a hesitation between the French tradition and the German tradition. The French tradition prevailed in North-Eastern Europe has become dominant in South-Eastern Europe, i.e. the Balkan countries.
The single quotation marks re-emerged around 1800 as a means of indicating a secondary level of quotation. One could expect that the logic of using the corresponding single mark would be applied everywhere, but it was not. In some languages using the angular quotation marks, the usage of the single guillemet,, became obsolete, being replaced by double curved ones: ; the single ones still survive, for instance, in Switzerland. In Eastern Europe, the curved quotation marks,, are used as a secondary level when the angular marks, are used as a primary level.

In English

In English writing, quotation marks are placed in pairs around a word or phrase to indicate:
In American writing, quotation marks are normally the double kind. If quotation marks are used inside another pair of quotation marks, then single quotation marks are used. For example: If another set of quotation marks is nested inside single quotation marks, double quotation marks are used again, and they continue to alternate as necessary.
British publishing is regarded as more flexible about whether double or single quotation marks should be used. A tendency to use single quotation marks in British writing is thought to have arisen after the invention of steam-powered presses in the mid-19th century and the consequent rise of London and New York as very separate industrialized printing centres with distinct norms. However, The King's English in 1908 noted that the prevailing British practice was to use double marks for most purposes, and single ones for quotations within quotations. Different media now follow different conventions in the United Kingdom.
Different varieties and styles of English have different conventions regarding whether terminal punctuation should be written inside or outside the quotation marks; North American printing usually puts ending punctuation to the left of the closing quotation mark, whether it is part of the original quoted material or not, while styles elsewhere vary widely and have different rationales for placing it inside or outside, often a matter of house style.
Regarding their appearance, there are two types of quotation marks:
The closing single quotation mark is identical in form to the apostrophe and similar to the prime symbol. The double quotation mark is identical to the ditto mark in English-language usage. It is also similar to—and often used to represent—the double prime symbol. However, the quotation marks, the apostrophe, and the prime serve quite different purposes.

Summary table

Other languages have similar conventions to English, but use different symbols or different placement.

! Basque
! Belarusian
! Bosnian
! Bulgarian
! Catalan
! Chinese, simplified
! Chinese, traditional
! Croatian
! Czech
! Danish
! Dutch
! English, UK
! English, US; English, Canada
! Esperanto
! Estonian
! Filipino
! Finnish
! rowspan="2" | French
! French, Swiss
! Galician
! Georgian
! German
! German, Swiss
! Greek
! Hebrew

! Hindi
! Hungarian
! Icelandic
! Indonesian
! Interlingua
! Irish
! Italian
! Italian, Swiss
! Japanese
! Kazakh
! Khmer
! Korean, North Korea
! Korean, South Korea
! Lao
! Latvian
! Lithuanian
! Lojban
! Macedonian
! Maltese
! Mongolian, Cyrillic script
! Mongolian, Mongolian script
! New Tai Lue
! Norwegian
! Occitan
! Pashto
! Persian

! Polish
! Portuguese, Brazil
! Portuguese, Portugal
! Romanian
! Romansh
! Russian
! Serbian
! Scottish Gaelic
! Slovak
! Slovene
! Sorbian
! Spanish
! Swedish
! Tai Le
! Tamil
! Tibetan
! Tigrinya
! Thai
! Turkish
! Ukrainian
! Uyghur
! Uzbek
! Vietnamese
! Welsh

Specific language features

Dutch

The standard form in the preceding table is taught in schools and used in handwriting. Most large newspapers have kept these quotation marks, but otherwise the alternative form with single or double “English-style” quotes is now often the only form seen in printed matter. Neutral quotation marks, and, are used widely, especially in texts typed on computers and on websites.
Although not generally common in the Netherlands any more, double angle quotation marks are still sometimes used in Belgium. Examples include the Flemish HUMO magazine and the Metro newspaper in Brussels.

German

The symbol used as the left quote in English is used as the right quote in Germany and Austria and a "low double comma" is used for the left quote. Its single quote form looks like a comma.
SamplesUnicode HTMLDescriptionWrong Symbols
U+201A, U+2018 ‚ ‘German single quotes , – comma left
' – Apostrophe right
U+201E, U+201C „ “German double quotes " – neutral double quotes

Some fonts, e.g. Verdana, were not designed with the flexibility to use an English left quote as a German right quote. Such fonts are therefore typographically incompatible with this German usage.
Double quotes are standard for denoting speech in German.
This style of quoting is also used in Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Georgian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene and in Ukrainian. This German double-quote style is also used in the Netherlands, but is falling out of fashion nowadays with the 'English-style' quotation marks being preferred. However, it still can be found on older shop signs and in most large newspapers.
Sometimes, especially in novels, guillemets are used in Germany and Austria :
In Switzerland, however, the [|French-style angle quotation mark sets] are also used for German printed text: «A ‹B›?»

Finnish and Swedish

In Finnish and Swedish, right quotes, called citation marks,, are used to mark both the beginning and the end of a quote. Double right-pointing angular quotes,, can also be used.
Alternatively, an en-dash followed by a space can be used to denote the beginning of quoted speech, in which case the end of the quotation is not specifically denoted. A line-break should not be allowed between the en-dash and the first word of the quotation.
SamplesUnicode HTMLDescription
U+2019 ’Secondary level quotation
U+201D ”Primary level quotation
U+00BB »Alternative primary level quotation
U+2013 –Alternative denotation at the beginning of quoted speech

French

uses angle quotation marks, adding a 'quarter-em space' within the quotes. However, many people now use the non-breaking space, because the difference between a non-breaking space and a four-per-em is virtually imperceptible, and the quarter-em glyph is omitted from many fonts. Even more commonly, many people just put a normal space between the quotation marks because the non-breaking space cannot be accessed easily from the keyboard; furthermore, many are simply not aware of this typographical refinement. Using the wrong type of space often results in a quotation mark appearing alone at the beginning of a line, since the quotation mark is treated as an independent word.
Sometimes, for instance on several French news sites such as Libération, Les Échos or Le Figaro, no space is used around the quotation marks. This parallels normal usage in other languages, e.g. Catalan, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, or in German, French and Italian as written in Switzerland:
in Bulletin de l’Agence générale des colonies, No. 302, Mai 1934, showing the comma-shaped symbols sitting on the baseline.
Initially, the French guillemet characters were not angle shaped but also used the comma shape. They were different from English quotes because they were standing on the baseline, and not above it or hanging down from it. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this shape evolved to look like small parentheses . The angle shape appeared later to increase the distinction and avoid confusions with apostrophes, commas and parentheses in handwritten manuscripts submitted to publishers. Unicode currently does not provide alternate codes for these 6/9 guillemets on the baseline, as they are considered to be form variants of guillemets, implemented in older French typography. Also there was not necessarily any distinction of shape between the opening and closing guillemets, with both types pointing to the right.
They must be used with non-breaking spaces, preferably narrow, if available, i.e. U+202F which is present in all up-to-date general-purpose fonts, but still missing in some computer fonts from the early years of Unicode, due to the belated encoding of U+202F after the flaw of not giving U+2008 non-breakable property as it was given to the related U+2007.
Legacy support of narrow non-breakable spaces was done at rendering level only, without interoperability as provided by Unicode support. High-end renderers as found in Desktop Publishing software should therefore be able to render this space using the same glyph as the breaking thin space U+2009, handling the non-breaking property internally in the text renderer/layout engine, because line-breaking properties are never defined in fonts themselves; such renderers should also be able to infer any width of space, and make them available as application controls, as is done with justifying/non-justifying.
In old-style printed books, when quotations span multiple lines of text, an additional closing quotation sign is traditionally used at the beginning of each line continuing a quotation; any right-pointing guillemet at the beginning of a line does not close the current quotation. This convention has been consistently used since the beginning of the 19th century by most book printers, but is no longer in use today. Such insertion of continuation quotation marks occurred even if there is a word hyphenation break. Given this feature has been obsoleted, there is no support for automatic insertion of these continuation guillemets in HTML or CSS, nor in word-processors. Old-style typesetting is emulated by breaking up the final layout with manual line breaks, and inserting the quotation marks at line start, much like pointy brackets before quoted plain text e-mail:
Unlike English, French does not set off unquoted material within a quotation by using a second set of quotation marks. Compare:
For clarity, some newspapers put the quoted material in italics:
The French Imprimerie nationale does not use different quotation marks for nesting quotes:
In this case, when there should be two adjacent opening or closing marks, only one is written:
The use of English quotation marks is increasing in French and usually follows English rules, for instance in situations when the keyboard or the software context doesn't allow the use of guillemets. The French news site L'Humanité uses straight quotation marks along with angle ones.
English quotes are also used sometimes for nested quotations:
But the most frequent convention used in printed books for nested quotations is to style them in italics. Single quotation marks are much more rarely used, and multiple levels of quotations using the same marks is often considered confusing for readers:
Further, running speech does not use quotation marks beyond the first sentence, as changes in speaker are indicated by a dash, as opposed to the English use of closing and re-opening the quotation. The dashes may be used entirely without quotation marks as well. In general, quotation marks are extended to encompass as much speech as possible, including not just non-spoken text such as “he said”, but also as long as the conversion extends. However, the quotation marks end at the last spoken text, not extending to the end of paragraphs when the final part is not spoken.

Greek

uses angled quotation marks :
and the quotation dash :
which translate to:
A closing quotation mark,, is added to the beginning of each new quoted paragraph.
When quotations are nested, double and then single quotation marks are used:.
SamplesUnicode HTMLDescription
U+00AB, U+00BB « »Greek first level double quotes
U+2015 ―Greek direct quotation em-dash

Hungarian

According to current recommendation by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences the main Hungarian quotation marks are comma-shaped double quotation marks set on the base-line at the beginning of the quote and at apostrophe-height at the end of it for first level,, reversed »French quotes« without space for the second level, and thus the following nested quotation pattern emerges:
… and with third level:
In Hungarian linguistic tradition the meaning of a word is signified by uniform apostrophe-shaped quotation marks:
A quotation dash is also used, and is predominant in belletristic literature.
SamplesUnicode HTMLDescription
U+201E, U+201D „ ”Hungarian first level double quotes
U+00BB, U+00AB » «Hungarian second level double quotes
U+2019 ’Hungarian unpaired quotes signifying "meaning"

Polish

According to current PN-83/P-55366 standard from 1983, Typesetting rules for composing Polish text one can use either „ordinary Polish quotes” or «French quotes» for first level, and ‚single Polish quotes’ or «French quotes» for second level, which gives three styles of nested quotes:
There is no space on the internal side of quote marks, with the exception of firet space between two quotation marks when there are no other characters between them.
The above rules have not changed since at least the previous BN-76/7440-02 standard from 1976 and are probably much older.
However, the part of the rules that concerns the use of guillemets conflicts with the Polish punctuation standard as given by dictionaries, including the Wielki Słownik Ortograficzny PWN recommended by the Polish Language Council. The PWN rules state:
In Polish books and publications, this style for use of guillemets is used almost exclusively. In addition to being standard for second level quotes, guillemet quotes are sometimes used as first level quotes in headings and titles but almost never in ordinary text in paragraphs.
Another style of quoting is to use an em-dash to open a quote; this is used almost exclusively to quote dialogues, and is virtually the only convention used in works of fiction.
An en-dash is sometimes used in place of the em-dash, especially so in newspaper texts.
SamplesUnicode HTMLDescription
U+201A, U+2019 ‚ ’Polish single quotes
U+201E, U+201D „ ”Polish double quotes
U+2015 ―Polish direct quotation em-dash
U+2013 –Polish direct quotation en-dash

Portuguese

Neither the Portuguese Language regulator nor the Brazilian prescribe what is the shape for quotation marks, they only prescribe when and how they should be used.
In Portugal, the angular quotation marks are traditionally used. They are the Latin tradition quotation marks, used normally by typographers. It is that also the chosen representation for displaying quotation marks in reference sources, and it is also the chosen representation from some sites dedicated to the Portuguese Language.
The Código de Redação for Portuguese-language documents published in the European Union prescribes three levels of quotation marks representation, :
However, the usage of English-style marks is growing in Portugal. That is probably due to the omnipresence of the English language and to the corresponding inability of some machines to display the angular quotation marks.
In Brazil, however, the usage of angular quotation marks is little known, with almost solely the curved quotation marks being used. This can be verified, for instance, in the difference between a Portuguese keyboard and a Brazilian keyboard.
The Portuguese-speaking African countries tend to follow Portugal's conventions, not the Brazilian ones.
Other usages of quotation marks are obsolete..

Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian

In Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian, angled quotation marks are used without spaces. In case of quoted material inside a quotation, rules and most noted style manuals prescribe the use of different kinds of quotation marks. However, Russian rules allow to use the same quotation marks for quoted material inside a quotation, and if inner and outer quotation marks fall together, then one of them should be omitted.
Right:
Permissible, when it is technically impossible to use different quotation marks:
It is common to use quotation dashes for dialogue, as well as within quotations for the reporting clause. For more details, see the :ru:Прямая речь|Russian Wikipedia article on this topic.

Spanish

uses angled quotation marks as well, but always without the spaces.
And, when quotations are nested in more levels than inner and outer quotation, the system is:
The use of English quotation marks is increasing in Spanish, and the El País style guide, which is widely followed in Spain, recommends them. Hispanic Americans often use them, owing to influence from the United States.

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

Corner brackets are well-suited for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages which are written in both vertical and horizontal orientations. China, South Korea, and Japan all use corner brackets when writing vertically. However, usages differ when writing horizontally:
White corner brackets are used to mark quote-within-quote segments in case that the corner brackets are used.
SamplesUnicode DescriptionUsage
U+300C, U+300D Corner brackets
Chinese:
Japanese:
낫표 		Japanese,
Korean,
Traditional Chinese
U+FE41, U+FE42
Corner brackets
Chinese:
Japanese:
낫표 		For vertical writing:
Japanese,
Korean,
Traditional Chinese,
Simplified Chinese
U+300E, U+300F White corner brackets
Chinese: 雙引號,
Japanese:
Korean: 겹낫표 		Japanese,
Korean,
Traditional Chinese
U+FE43, U+FE44
White corner brackets
Chinese: 雙引號,
Japanese:
Korean: 겹낫표 		For vertical writing:
Japanese,
Korean,
Traditional Chinese,
Simplified Chinese
U+201C, U+201D Double quotation marks
Korean: 큰따옴표,
Chinese: 雙引號 		Korean,
Traditional Chinese,
Simplified Chinese
U+2018, U+2019 Single quotation marks
Korean: 작은따옴표,
Chinese: 單引號 		Korean,
Chinese
U+300A, U+300B Double angle brackets
Korean: 겹화살괄호
Chinese: 書名號 		Korean,
Chinese
U+3008, U+3009 Single angle brackets
Korean: 홑화살괄호
Chinese: 書名號 		Korean,
Chinese

Quotation dash

Another typographical style is to omit quotation marks for lines of dialogue, replacing them with an initial dash, as in lines from James Joyce's Ulysses:
This style is particularly common in Bulgarian, French, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese. James Joyce always insisted on this style, although his publishers did not always respect his preference. Alan Paton used this style in Cry, the Beloved Country. Charles Frazier used this style for his novel Cold Mountain as well. Details for individual languages are given above.
The dash is often combined with ordinary quotation marks. For example, in French, a guillemet may be used to initiate running speech, with each change in speaker indicated by a dash, and a closing guillemet to mark the end of the quotation.
Dashes are also used in many modern English novels, especially those written in non-standard dialects. Some examples include:
In Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Georgian, Romanian, Lithuanian and Hungarian, the reporting clause in the middle of a quotation is separated with two additional dashes :
In Finnish, on the other hand, a second dash is added when the quote continues after a reporting clause:
The Unicode standard introduced a separate character to be used as a quotation dash. In general it is the same length as an em-dash, and so this is often used instead. The main difference between them is that at least some software will insert a line break after an em dash, but not after a quotation dash. Both are displayed in the following table.
SamplesUnicode HTMLDescription
U+2015 ―Quotation dash, also known as horizontal bar
U+2014 —Em-dash, an alternative to the quotation dash
U+2013 –En-dash, used instead of em-dash for quotation dash in some languages

Electronic documents

Different typefaces, character encodings and computer languages use various encodings and glyphs for quotation marks.

Typewriters and early computers

"Ambidextrous" or "straight" quotation marks were introduced on typewriters to reduce the number of keys on the keyboard, and were inherited by computer keyboards and character sets. Some computer systems designed in the past had character sets with proper opening and closing quotes. However, the ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, only contains a straight single quote and double quote.
Many systems, such as the personal computers of the 1980s and early 1990s, actually drew these quotes like curved closing quotes on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this :
These same systems often drew the grave accent as an open quote glyph. Thus, using a grave accent instead of a quotation mark as the opening quote gave a proper appearance of single quotes at the cost of semantic correctness. Nothing similar was available for the double quote, so many people resorted to using two single quotes for double quotes, which would look approximately like the following:
The typesetting application TeX uses this convention for input files. The following is an example of TeX input which yields proper curly quotation marks.
The Unicode slanted/curved quotes described below are shown here for comparison:

Keyboard layouts

Typographical quotation marks are almost absent on keyboards.
In typewriter keyboards, the curved quotation marks were not implemented. Instead, to save space, the straight quotation marks were invented as a compromise. Even in countries that did not use curved quotation marks, angular quotation marks were not implemented either.
Computer keyboards followed the steps of typewriter keyboards. Most computer keyboards do not have specific keys for curved quotation marks or angled quotation marks. This may also have to do with computer character sets:
In languages that use the curved “…” quotation marks, they are available in:
In languages that use the angular «…» quotation marks, they are available in:
In languages that use the corner bracket 「…」 quotation marks, they are available in:
In languages that use the angle bracket 《…》 they are available in:
In languages that use the curved „…“ quotation marks, they are available in:
In languages that use the curved „…” quotation marks, they are available in:
In languages that use the curved ”…” quotation marks, they are available in:
Historically, support for curved quotes was a problem in information technology, primarily because the widely used ASCII character set did not include a representation for them.
The term 'smart quotes',, is from the name in several word processors of a function aimed this problem: automatically converting straight quotes typed by the user into curved quotes, the feature attempts to be "smart" enough to determine whether the punctuation marked opening or closing. Since curved quotes are the typographically correct ones, word processors have traditionally offered curved quotes to users. Before Unicode was widely accepted and supported, this meant representing the curved quotes in whatever 8-bit encoding the software and underlying operating system was using. The character sets for Windows and Macintosh used two different pairs of values for curved quotes, while ISO 8859-1 has no curved quotes, making cross-platform and -application compatibility difficult.
Performance by these "smart quotes" features was far from perfect overall. As many word processors have the function enabled by default, users may not have realized that the ASCII-compatible straight quotes they were typing on their keyboards ended up as something different.
The curved apostrophe is the same character as the closing single quote. "Smart quotes" features, however, wrongly convert initial apostrophes into opening single quotes.. The two very different functions of this character can cause confusion, particularly in British styles, in which single quotes are the standard primary.
Unicode support has since become the norm for operating systems. Thus, in at least some cases, transferring content containing curved quotes from a word processor to another application or platform has been less troublesome, provided all steps in the process are Unicode-aware. But there are still applications which still use the older character sets, or output data using them, and thus problems still occur.
There are other considerations for including curved quotes in the widely used markup languages HTML, XML, and SGML. If the encoding of the document supports direct representation of the characters, they can be used, but doing so can cause difficulties if the document needs to be edited by someone who is using an editor that cannot support the encoding. For example, many simple text editors only handle a few encodings or assume that the encoding of any file opened is a platform default, so the quote characters may appear as the generic replacement character or 'mojibake'. HTML includes a set of entities for curved quotes: ‘, ’, ‚, “, ”, and „. XML does not define these by default, but specifications based on it can do so, and XHTML does. In addition, while the HTML 4, XHTML and XML specifications allow specifying numeric character references in either hexadecimal or decimal, SGML and older versions of HTML only support decimal references. Thus, to represent curly quotes in XML and SGML, it is safest to use the decimal numeric character references. That is, to represent the double curly quotes use “ and ”, and to represent single curly quotes use ‘ and ’. Both numeric and named references function correctly in almost every modern browser. While using numeric references can make a page more compatible with outdated browsers, using named references are safer for systems that handle multiple character encodings.

Usenet and email

The style of quoting known as Usenet quoting uses the greater-than sign, prepended to a line of text to mark it as a quote. This convention was later standardized in , and was adopted subsequently by many email clients when automatically including quoted text from previous messages.

Unicode code point table

In Unicode, 30 characters are marked Quotation Mark=Yes by character property. They all have general category "Punctuation", and a subcategory Open, Close, Initial, Final or Other. Several other Unicode characters with quotation mark semantics lack the character property.