Quotation mark

Quotation marks, also called quotes or inverted commas, are punctuation marks used to set off speech, a quotation, or a phrase. They have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.

Usage

Quotations & speech

An opening quotation mark should appear at the beginning of each paragraph of the quoted text and a closing quotation mark at the end of the last only.

A closing quotation mark is used before, and an opening quotation mark after, phrases such as he said that interrupt speech.

British and United States style differs as to whether single or double quotation marks are used, but neither is an absolute rule, and a publisher's or even an author's style may take precedence. (The only absolute rule is consistency!) Although illogical, the American convention is for sentence punctuation to be included inside the quotation marks, even if the punctuation is not part of the quoted sentence:

'Good morning, Dave,' said HAL.

"Good morning, Dave," said HAL.

The British style is to have the punctuation where it belongs logically, for small quoted phrases:

Someone shouted 'Shut up!'.

Also called "plain quotes", they are teardrops.

However, despite what is sometimes written on discussions of punctuation, British positioning is the same as American in complete quoted speech:

'Good morning, Dave,' said HAL.

In some subject areas (such as software documentation and chemistry), it is conventional to include only what is part of the quoted phrase within the quotes, for clarity:

Enter the URL as "www.wikipedia.org", the name as "Wikipedia", and click "OK".

For speech within speech:

'HAL said, "Good morning, Dave",' said Frank.

"HAL said, 'Good morning, Dave'," said Frank.

Do not use quotation marks for paraphrased speech:

WRONG: HAL said that "Everything was going extremely well."

RIGHT: HAL said that everything was going extremely well.

Emphasis and ironic quotes

Another important usage of quotation marks is to indicate or call attention to ironic or apologetic words. Ironic quotes are sometimes called scare quotes or sneer quotes.

He claimed he was too "busy" to visit me.

Ironic quotes should be used with care, as they can obscure the writer's intended meaning and are easily confused with quotations.

Quotes are also used to indicate that the writer realizes that the word is not being used in its (currently) accepted sense ("in the fifteenth century, we 'knew' that blah blah..."), or to emphasize that an instance of a word refers to the word itself, rather than its associated concept.

Titles of artistic works

Quotation marks, rather than italics, are generally used for the titles of shorter works. Whether these are single or double is again a matter of style:

• short fiction, poetry, etc.: Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel"
• book chapters: The first chapter of 3001: The Final Odyssey is "Comet Cowboy"
• articles in books, magazines, journals, etc.: "Extra-Terrestrial Relays", Wireless World, October 1945
• album tracks, singles, etc.: David Bowie's "Space Oddity"

See also Wikipedia:Manual of Style.

Glyphs

A list of glyphs used as quotation marks and their Unicode (and HTML) values and names follows. (Warning: Some of these glyphs may not display properly in older browsers, which may substitute other sorts or a square.)

Straight quotes

These are often used in rapid writing and are the standard quotation marks used on typewriters and computers. However, modern word processors have started to convert text to use curved quotes (see below). Some computer systems designed in the past had proper opening and closing quotes, with a few machines even making a distinction between regular apostrophes (e.g. couldn't) and apostrophes that show possession (e.g. Dave's car). However, the standard ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, only made three quotation marks available: ", ', and the dubious backquote `.

Many systems, like the personal computers of the 1980s and early 90s, actually drew straight quotes like curved closing quotes on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this (approximately):

     ”Good morning, Dave,” said HAL.
     ’Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.

The backquote (`) could then be used when doing single quote marks, and give a proper appearance. Unfortunately, nothing similar was available for the double-quote, so many people resorted to using sets of two single quotes for punctuation (this is how TeX knows you want to produce book quotes, for instance):

     ‘Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.
     ‘‘Good morning, Dave,’’ said HAL.

However, the appearance of these characters has varied greatly from system to system. Currently, due to the transition to new character sets such as Unicode (which specifies that single and double quotes should be vertical rather than angled) such tricks can lead to a fairly different appearance:

     ``Good morning, Dave,'' said HAL.

Straight quotes are often used to approximate the prime and double prime when when signifying inches and feet, or arcminutes and arcseconds. For instance, 5 feet and 6 inches is often written 5' 6" (or correctly, 5′ 6″), and 40 degrees, 20 minutes, and 50 seconds is written 40° 20' 50" (correctly, 40° 20′ 50″).

Curved quotes in English

English curved quotes, also called "book quotes" or "curly quotes", look like small 6 (six) and 9 (nine) with the circles filled. They are preferred in formal writing and with correct typography. They are *emphatically* not preferred in normal ASCII internet email, though some email programs default to converting them anyway.

Curved quotes are also sometimes referred to as "smart quotes", in reference to the name of a function found in word processors like Microsoft Word that automatically converts straight quotes typed by the user into curved quotes; this is a misnomer, as it is not the quotes themselves that are "smart" but the function which is able to correctly determine (most of the time) whether to use a right-curving or a left-curving glyph in any particular case.

Variants of ‘ and “ are:

‛ – x'201B' (HTML: ‛) – single high-reversed-9, or single reversed comma, quotation mark

‟ – x'201F' (HTML: ‟) – double high-reversed-9, or double reversed comma, quotation mark

Curved quotes in German

Confusingly, what is the "left quote" in English is used as the right quote in German, and a different "low 9 quote" is used for the left instead:

Angle quotes in French, Italian, Russian and Spanish

Some languages, such as French, Italian or Russian, use angle quotation marks (chevrons or guillemets) and add space within the quotes, as in:

« Est-ce que vous aimez ma ponctuation, Henri ? »

French, Italian and Russian often omit quotation marks in lines of dialogue, replacing them with an initial dash:

— Je m'ennuie tellement, dit-elle.

— Cela n'est pas de ma faute, retorqua-t-il.

Also unlike English, French does not set off unquoted material within a quotation mark by using a second set of quotes. Compare:

"This is a great day for Montreal," the minister said. "These investments will permit economic growth."

« C'est une belle journée pour les Montréalais, soutient le ministre. Ces investissements stimuleront la croissance économique. »

For clarity, some newspapers put the quoted material in italics:

« C'est une belle journée pour les Montréalais, soutient le ministre. Ces investissements stimuleront la croissance économique. »

The use of English quotation marks is increasing in French, and usually follows English rules. English quotes are also used for nested quotations, as American English uses single quotes:

« Son "explication" n'est qu'une mensonge, » s'indigna le député.

Spanish uses angled quotation marks as well, but often without the spaces.

Although not common in Dutch in general, double angle quotation marks are used in Dutch government publications. Sometimes, these are used in German publications also, but rather rarely, and then exactly reversed and without spacing.

Square quotes in East Asian languages

The Japanese and Chinese languages use the following quotation marks. The double quotes are used for quote-within-quote.

Table

1. No or one point space
2. One point space
3. One to two points space
4. Quarter em space
5. In longer quotes the leading quotation mark is repeated in front of each line
6. Inside another quote
7. In Switzerland the same quote signs are used for all languages: French, German, Italian

See also: Double quote