Quotation mark

Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify 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 glyph. Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.
The single quotation mark is traced to Ancient Greek practice, adopted and adapted by monastic copyists. Isidore of Seville, in his seventh century encyclopedia, Etymologiae, described their use of the Greek diplé (a chevron):
The double quotation mark derives from a marginal notation used in fifteenth-century manuscript annotations to indicate a passage of particular importance (not necessarily a quotation); 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 (now in the modern opening and closing forms) 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.
By the nineteenth century, the design and usage began to be specific to each region. In Western Europe the custom became to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity of each mark aimed 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 called guillemets: «...». Some authors claim that the reason for this was a practical one, in order to get a character that was clearly distinguishable from apostrophes, commas, and 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, the decimal separator, the thousands separator, etc. Other authors claim that the reason for this was an aesthetic one: the elevated quotation marks created extra white space before and after the word, below the quotation marks. This 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 spaces between the quotation marks and the word(s) quoted, the French usage does insert them, even if they are narrow spaces.
The curved quotation marks ("66–99") 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, the practice was to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity aimed 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 some, e.g. Poland, adopted a variant with the convexity of the closing mark aimed rightward like the opening one, „...”.
Sweden (and Finland) choose a convention where the convexity of both marks was aimed to the right but lined up both at the top level: ”...”.
In Eastern Europe, there was hesitation between the French tradition «...» and the German tradition „...“. The French tradition prevailed in Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus), whereas the German tradition, or its modified version with the convexity of the closing mark aimed rightward, has become dominant in Southeastern Europe, e.g. in the Balkan countries. In Romania the: „...” version is officially recognized by the Romanian Academy.
In some languages using the angular quotation marks, the usage of the single guillemet, ‹...›, became obsolete, being replaced by double curved ones: “...”, though the single ones still survive, for instance, in Switzerland. In Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, the curved quotation marks, „...“, are used as a secondary level or in handwriting, while the angular marks, «...», are used as the primary level on printed text.
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 (the primary style). If quotation marks are used inside another pair of quotation marks, then single quotation marks are used. For example: "Didn't she say 'I like red best' when I asked her wine preferences?" he asked his guests. 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 (though this is rarely done).
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 mid-19th century invention of steam-powered presses and the consequent rise of London and New York as distinct, industrialized publishing centers whose publishing houses adhered to separate norms. 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 full stops and commas (but not colons, semicolons, exclamation or question marks) inside the closing quotation mark, whether it is part of the original quoted material or not. Styles elsewhere vary widely and have different rationales for placing it inside or outside, often a matter of house style.
Regarding their appearance, two shape classifications of quotation marks are used in English-language texts:
The closing or right 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. These all serve different purposes.
Other languages have similar conventions to English, but use different symbols or different placement.
Contemporary Bulgarian employs the em dash or the quotation dash (the horizontal bar) followed by a space character at the beginning of each direct-speech segment by a different character in order to mark direct speech in prose and in most journalistic question and answer interviews; in such cases, the use of standard quotation marks is left for in-text citations or to mark the names of institutions, companies, and sometimes also brand or model names.
Air quotes are also widely used in face-to-face communication in contemporary Bulgarian but usually resemble " ... " (secondary: ' ... ') unlike written Bulgarian quotation marks.
The standard form in the preceding table is taught in schools and used in handwriting. Most large newspapers have kept these low-high quotation marks, „ and ”; otherwise, the alternative form with single or double English-style quotes is now often the only form seen in printed matter. Neutral (straight) 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 (guillemet) quotation marks are still sometimes used in Belgium. Examples include the Flemish HUMO magazine and the Metro newspaper in Brussels.
The symbol used as the left (typographical) quote in English is used as the right quote in Germany and Austria and a "low double comma" „ (not used in English) is used for the left quote. Its single quote form ‚ looks like a comma.
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. In Bulgarian, Icelandic, Estonian, Lithuanian, and Russian, single quotation marks are not used.
Sometimes, especially in novels, guillemets (angled quotation marks) are used in Germany and Austria (but pointing in the opposite direction compared to French): »A ›B‹?«
In Switzerland, the French-style angle quotation mark sets are also used for German printed text: «A ‹B›?»
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 (non-breaking) space can be used to denote the beginning of quoted speech, in which case the end of the quotation is not specifically denoted (see section Quotation dash below). A line-break should not be allowed between the en-dash and the first word of the quotation.
French uses angle quotation marks (guillemets, or duck-foot quotes), adding a 'quarter-em space' within the quotes. With proper localization, computers automatically add the proper spacing. When localization is not available, many people use a non-breaking space between the quotation mark and the nearest word inside it because the difference between a non-breaking space and a four-per-em space is virtually imperceptible, many computer fonts do not include a quarter-em space, and the Unicode quarter-em space is breakable. Even more commonly, many people put a normal (breaking) space inside the quotation marks because the non-breaking space cannot be accessed easily from the keyboard, or because they are not aware of this typographical refinement. Using a breakable space of any kind often results in a quotation mark appearing alone at the beginning of a line, since the quotation mark is erroneously treated as an independent word.
French news sites such as Libération, Les Échos and Le Figaro do not add manual spacing, leaving it up to localization and the browser to space the guillemets properly.
Initially, the French guillemets were not angle shaped but also used the comma (6/9) shape. They were different from English quotes because they were standing (like today's guillemets) on the baseline (like lowercase letters), not raised above it (like apostrophes and English quotation marks) or hanging below it (like commas). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this shape evolved to look like (( small parentheses )). The angle shape was introduced later to make them easier to distinguish from 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 (such as the Didot font design). With this older style there was also not necessarily any distinction of shape between the opening and closing guillemets; both often pointed to the right (as today's French closing guillemets do).
In old-style printed books, when quotations span multiple lines of text (including multiple paragraphs), an additional closing quotation sign is traditionally used at the beginning of each line continuing a quotation; this right-pointing guillemet at the beginning of a line does not close the current quotation. This convention was consistently used from the beginning of the 19th century by most book printers, but is no longer in use today. Such insertion of continuation quotation marks was rigidly maintained, even at a word hyphenation break. Since these continuation marks are obsolete in French, there is no support for automatic insertion of 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 identify unquoted material within a quotation by using a second set of quotation marks. Compare:
For clarity, some newspapers put nested quoted material in italics:
The French Imprimerie nationale (cf. Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie nationale, presses de l'Imprimerie nationale, Paris, 2002) 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 dialogue 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. (For other languages employing dashes, see section Quotation dash below.) 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 unspoken text such as "he said" (as previously noted), but also as long as the conversion extends. The quotation marks end at the last word of spoken text (rather than extending to the end of the paragraph) when the final part is not spoken.
Greek uses angled quotation marks (εισαγωγικά – isagogiká):
and the quotation dash (παύλα – pávla):
which translate to:
A closing quotation mark, », is added to the beginning of each new paragraph within a quotation.
When quotations are nested, the nested parts use English-style quotation marks, double and then (if necessary) single: «...“...‘...’...”...».
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, („Quote”), reversed »French quotes« without space (the German tradition) 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 (unpaired) apostrophe-shaped quotation marks:
A quotation dash is also used, and is predominant in belletristic literature.
In Israel, the traditional practice in printing and handwriting is to use „low-high” quote marks. Since the 2000s, the plain quotes have become more common. The 2013 revision of the SI-1452 standard for Hebrew keyboard, available since 2012 in Windows 8 and in desktop Linux systems, supports both systems, as does the Gboard keyboard for touchscreen devices.
Norwegian uses angled quotation marks (Anførselstegn)
According to current PN-83/P-55366 standard from 1983 (but not dictionaries, see below), Typesetting rules for composing Polish text (Zasady składania tekstów w języku polskim) one can use either „ordinary Polish quotes” or «French quotes» (without space) 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 1⁄4 firet (≈ 1⁄4 em) space between two quotation marks when there are no other characters between them (e.g. ,„ and ’”).
The above rules have not changed since at least the previous BN-76/7440-02 standard from 1976 and are probably much older.
These rules on the use of guillemets conflict with the ones given by Polish dictionaries, including the Wielki Słownik Ortograficzny PWN recommended by the Polish Language Council. The PWN rules state:
In Polish printed books and publications, this dictionary-recommended style for guillemets (also known as »German quotes«) 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 for ordinary text in paragraphs.
Another style of quoting is to use an em-dash to open a quote; this is used almost exclusively for quoting dialogues rather than for single statements, and is virtually always the one used for that purpose in works of fiction.
An en-dash is sometimes used in place of the em-dash, especially so in newspaper texts.
Neither the Portuguese language regulator nor the Brazilian prescribe a particular shape for quotation marks, they only prescribe when and how they should be used.
In Portugal, angular quotation marks (ex. «quote») are traditionally used. They are the Latin tradition quotation marks, normally used by typographers, and are also the usual style in reference sources, as well as on some websites dedicated to the Portuguese language.
The Código de Redação for Portuguese-language documents published in the European Union prescribes three levels of quotation marks, «...“...‘...’...”...»:
The usage of curved quotation marks (ex. “quote” and ‘quote’) is growing in Portugal, probably due to the omnipresence of the English language and to the corresponding difficulty (or even inability) to enter angular quotation marks on some machines (mobile phones, cash registers, calculators, etc.).
In Brazil, angular quotation marks are rare, and curved quotation marks (“quote” and ‘quote’) are almost always used. An example of this can be seen in the difference between a Portuguese keyboard (which has a key for « and ») and a Brazilian keyboard.
The Portuguese-speaking African countries tend to follow Portugal's conventions, not the Brazilian ones.
Other usages of quotation marks (“quote„ for double, ‹quote› for single) are obsolete in Portuguese..
In Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian, the angled quotation (Belarusian: «двукоссе», Russian: «кавычки», Ukrainian: «лапки») 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.
Example in Russian:
Пушкин писал Дельвигу: «Жду „Цыганов“ и тотчас тисну».
(Pushkin wrote to Delvig: "Waiting for 'Gypsies', and publish at once.")
Example in Ukrainian:
«І, звісно, не обійтись без користування словником. Один мій знайомий поет і літературознавець якось жартуючи сказав: “Я волію читати словники, ніж поеми. У словнику ті самі слова, що і в поемі, але подані в систематизованому порядку”. Це сказано жартома, але “читати словники” — не така вже дивовижна і дивацька річ, як може здатися».
("And, of course, you can't avoid using a dictionary. One of my acquaintances, a poet and literary critic, once jokingly said: 'I prefer to read dictionaries than poems. The dictionary has the same words as in the poem, but is presented in a systematic way'. It's a joke, but 'reading dictionaries' is not as amazing and bizarre as it may seem.")
Spanish uses angled quotation marks (comillas latinas or angulares), with no space between the quotation mark and the quoted material.
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; 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.
Corner brackets are well-suited for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, because they accommodate vertical and horizontal writing equally well. China, South Korea, and Japan all use corner brackets when writing vertically. Usage differs when writing horizontally:
When corner brackets are being used for quotations, quote-within-quote segments are marked with white corner brackets.
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 (and no quotation marks at all in some of his later work). 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 a dash to indicate each change in speaker and a closing guillemet to mark the end of the quotation.
Dashes are also used in many modern English novels, especially those written in nonstandard dialects. Some examples include:
In Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Georgian, Romanian, Lithuanian and Hungarian, a reporting clause in the middle of a quotation is marked by a dash on each side of it. The initial quotation dash is followed by a single space, and any other quotation dashes in the same paragraph have a single space on each side. A Russian example:
A Hungarian example:
In Finnish, on the other hand, the beginning of a reporting clause is marked only by the punctuation already existing in the sentence, or (if there was none) by adding a comma. When a quote continues after the reporting clause, the clause ends with a comma, and the continuation begins with another dash:
The Unicode standard introduced a separate character U+2015 ― HORIZONTAL BAR to be used as a quotation dash. It may be the same length as an em-dash, which is often used instead. Some software will allow a line break after an ordinary em-dash, but prevent it after a quotation dash. Both are displayed in the following table.
Different typefaces, character encodings and computer languages use various encodings and glyphs for quotation marks.
'Ambidextrous' or 'straight' quotation marks ' " were introduced on typewriters to minimise the number of keys on the keyboard, and were inherited by computer keyboards and character sets. The ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, contains the straight versions only (U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE and U+0022 " QUOTATION MARK).
Many systems, such as the personal computers of the 1980s and early 1990s, actually drew these ASCII quotes like closing quotes on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this (approximately):
These same systems often drew the backtick (the free standing character U+0060 ` GRAVE ACCENT) as an 'open quote' glyph (usually a mirror image so it still sloped in the direction of a grave accent). Using this character as the opening quote gave a typographic approximation of curved single quotes. 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 standard added codepoints for slanted or curved quotes (U+201C “ LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK and U+201D ” RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK, described further below), shown here for comparison:
The Unicode mapping for PostScript Standard Encoding preserves the typographic approximation convention by mapping its equivalent of ASCII grave and single-quote to the Unicode curly quotation mark characters.
On most keyboards, typographical quotation marks are absent.
When typewriter keyboards were designed, curved quotation marks were not implemented. Instead, to limit the number of characters (and keys) required, straight quotation marks were invented as a compromise. (In countries that use angled quotation marks, those were not implemented on typewriters either.)
Early computer keyboards copied layouts that had been established by 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 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 (at minimum as available characters). 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 (historically the default character set for the Unixes and older Linux systems) has no curved quotes, making cross-platform and -application compatibility difficult.
Performance by these "smart quotes" features was far from perfect overall (variance potential by e.g. subject matter, formatting/style convention, user typing habits). As many word processors (including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org) 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 (conversely users could incorrectly assume its functioning in other applications, e.g. composing emails).
The curved apostrophe is the same character as the closing single quote. "Smart quotes" features wrongly convert initial apostrophes (as in 'tis, 'em, 'til, and '89) into opening single quotes. (An example of this error appears in the advertisements for the television show 'Til Death.) 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 (or any other non-ASCII characters) from a word processor to another application or platform has been less troublesome, provided all steps in the process (including the clipboard if applicable) 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" (gibberish). HTML includes a set of entities for curved quotes: &lsquo; (left single), &rsquo; (right single or apostrophe), &sbquo; (low 9 single), &ldquo; (left double), &rdquo; (right double), and &bdquo; (low 9 double). 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 (and many old implementations) 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 &#8220; and &#8221;, and to represent single curly quotes use &#8216; and &#8217;. 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 (i.e. RSS aggregators and search results).
In Windows file and folder names, the straight double quotation mark is prohibited, as it is a reserved character. The curved quotation marks, as well as the straight single quotation mark, are permitted.
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 RFC 3676, and was adopted subsequently by many email clients when automatically including quoted text from previous messages (in plain text mode).
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 (Ps, Pe, Pi, Pf, Po). Several other Unicode characters with quotation mark semantics lack the character property.