Guillemets (, also , , ) are a pair of

punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, c ...

marks in the form of sideways double chevrons, and , used as

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 sam ...

s in some languages. In some of these languages, "single" guillemets, and , are used for a quotation inside another quotation. Guillemets are not conventionally used in English.

Terminology

Guillemets may also be called angle, Latin, Castilian, Spanish, or French quotes/quotation marks. ''Guillemet'' is a

diminutive A diminutive is a word obtained by modifying a root word to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment, and sometimes to belittle s ...

of the French name ', apparently after the French printer and

punchcutter Punchcutting is a craft used in traditional typography to cut letter punches in steel as the first stage of making metal type. Steel punches in the shape of the letter would be used to stamp matrices into copper, which were locked into a mould sh ...

Guillaume Le Bé (1525–1598), though he did not invent the symbols: they first appear in a 1527 book printed by Josse Bade. In

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

software, its file format specifications, and in all fonts derived from these that contain the characters, the glyph names are incorrectly spelled and (a

malapropism A malapropism (; also called a malaprop, acyrologia or Dogberryism) is the incorrect use of a word in place of a word with a similar sound, either unintentionally or for comedic effect, resulting in a nonsensical, often humorous utterance. An exam ...

: guillemot is actually a species of seabird). Adobe has acknowledged the error. Likewise,

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

mistakenly uses and to name keys producing the characters.

Shape

Guillemets are smaller than less-than and

greater-than sign The greater-than sign is a mathematical symbol that denotes an inequality between two values. The widely adopted form of two equal-length strokes connecting in an acute angle at the right, , has been found in documents dated as far back as 1631 ...

s, which in turn are smaller than

angle bracket A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their n ...

Guillemets in different fonts with italics

Uses

As quotation marks

Guillemets are used pointing outwards («like this») to indicate speech in these languages and regions: * Albanian *

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian diaspora, Armenian communities around the ...

* Azerbaijani (mostly in the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...

) * Belarusian * Breton * Bulgarian (rarely used; „...“ is official) * Catalan * Chinese (《 and 》 are used to indicate a book or album title) *

Esperanto Esperanto (, ) is the world's most widely spoken Constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be 'the International Language' (), it is intended to be a universal second language for ...

(usage varies) *

Estonian Estonian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe * Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent * Estonian language * Estonian cuisine * Estonian culture See also

...

(marked usage; „...“ prevails) *

Franco-Provençal Franco-Provençal (also Francoprovençal, Patois or Arpitan) is a Gallo-Romance languages, Gallo-Romance language that originated and is spoken in eastern France, western Switzerland, and northwestern Italy. Franco-Provençal has several di ...

* French (spaced out by

thin space In typography, a thin space is a space character whose width is usually or of an em. It is used to add a narrow space, such as between nested quotation marks or to separate glyphs that interfere with one another. It is not as narrow as the hai ...

s « like this », except no spaces in Switzerland) * Galician *

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

* Khmer * Northern Korean (in Southern Korean, “...” is used) * Kurdish * Latvian (''stūrainās pēdiņas'') * Norwegian * Persian * Portuguese (used mostly in

European Portuguese European Portuguese (, ), also known as Lusitanian Portuguese () or as the Portuguese (language) of Portugal (), refers to the dialects of the Portuguese language spoken in Portugal. The word "European" was chosen to avoid the clash of "Portugues ...

, due to its presence in typical computer keyboards; considered obsolete in

Brazilian Portuguese Brazilian Portuguese (; ; also known as pt-BR) is the set of Variety (linguistics), varieties of Portuguese language native to Brazil. It is spoken by almost all of the 203 million inhabitants of Brazil and widely across the Brazilian diaspora ...

) * Romanian; only to indicate a quotation within a quotation *

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

, and some languages of the

former Soviet Union The post-Soviet states, also referred to as the former Soviet Union or the former Soviet republics, are the independent sovereign states that emerged/re-emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Prior to their independence, they ...

using

(„...“ is also used for nested quotes and in hand-written text.) * Spanish (uncommon in daily usage, but commonly used in publishing) * Swiss languages * Turkish (dated usage; almost entirely replaced with “...” by late 20th century) *

Uyghur Uyghur may refer to: * Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia (West China) ** Uyghur language, a Turkic language spoken primarily by the Uyghurs *** Old Uyghur language, a different Turkic language spoken in the Uyghur K ...

* Ukrainian * Uzbek (mostly in the

) * Vietnamese (previously, now “...” is official) Guillemets are used pointing inwards (»like this«) to indicate speech in these languages: * Croatian (preferred by typographers, alternate pair „...“ is in common use) *

Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus *Czech (surnam ...

(traditional but declining usage; „...“ prevails) * Danish (“...” is also used) *

(very uncommon) *

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

(guillemets are preferred for books, while „...“ is preferred in newspapers and handwriting; see above for usage in Swiss German) * Hungarian (only used „inside a section »as a secondary quote« marked by the usual quotes” like this) * Polish (used to indicate a quote inside a quote as defined by dictionaries; more common usage in practice. See also:

Polish orthography Polish orthography is the system of writing the Polish language. The language is written using the Polish alphabet, which derives from the Latin alphabet, but includes some additional letters with diacritics. The orthography is mostly phonetic, o ...

) * Serbian (marked usage; „...“ prevails) * Slovak (traditional but declining usage; „...“ prevails) * Slovene („...“ and “...” also used) * Swedish (this style, and »...» are considered typographically fancy; ”...” is the common form of quotation) Guillemets are used pointing right (»like this») to indicate speech in these languages: * Finnish (”...” is the common and correct form) * Swedish (this style, and »...« are considered typographically fancy; ”...” is the common form of quotation)

Ditto mark

In Quebec, the right-hand guillemet, , called a , is used as a

ditto mark The ditto mark is a shorthand sign, used mostly in hand-written text, indicating that the words or figures above it are to be repeated. The mark is made using "a pair of apostrophes"; "a pair of marks used underneath a word"; the symbol (quot ...

UML

Guillemets are used in

Unified Modeling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. UML provides a standard notation for many types of diagrams which can be roughly ...

to indicate a

stereotype In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalization, generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can ...

of a standard element.

Mail merge

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

uses guillemets when creating

mail merge Mail merge consists of combining mail and letters and pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels for mass mailings from a form letter. This feature is usually employed in a word processing document which contains fixed text (which is the same in ...

s. Microsoft use these punctuation marks to denote a mail merge "field", such as , or . On the final printout, the guillemet-marked tags are replaced by each instance of the corresponding data item intended for that field by the user.

Encoding

Double guillemets are present in many 8-bit

extended ASCII Extended ASCII is a repertoire of character encodings that include (most of) the original 96 ASCII character set, plus up to 128 additional characters. There is no formal definition of "extended ASCII", and even use of the term is sometimes critic ...

character sets. They were at 0xAE and 0xAF (174 and 175) in CP437 on the IBM PC, and 0xC7 and 0xC8 in Mac OS Roman, and placed in several of

ISO 8859 ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC ...

code pages (namely: -1, -7, -8, -9, -13, -15, -16) at 0xAB and 0xBB (171 and 187). Microsoft added the single guillemets to

CP1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 (Windows code page 1252) is a legacy single-byte character encoding that is used by default (as the "ANSI code page") in Microsoft Windows throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. Initially t ...

and similar sets used in Windows at 0x8B and 0x9B (139 and 155) (where the ISO standard placed

C1 control code The C0 and C1 control code or control character sets define control codes for use in text by computer systems that use ASCII and derivatives of ASCII. The codes represent additional information about the text, such as the position of a cursor, a ...

s).

Unicode

The ISO 8859 locations were inherited by Unicode, which added the single guillemets at new locations: * * * * Despite their names, the characters are mirrored when used in

right-to-left A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

contexts.

References

External links

{{navbox punctuation Punctuation Typographical symbols