The
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
character (U+2019 ) is used for both a
typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing)
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 ...
. This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as
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 ...
) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user's typing. There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC
.
The
straight apostrophe (the "ASCII apostrophe", ) is even more ambiguous, as it could also be intended as a left or right quotation mark, or a
prime symbol
The prime symbol , double prime symbol , triple prime symbol , and quadruple prime symbol are used to designate units and for other purposes in mathematics, science, linguistics and music.
Although the characters differ little in appearance fr ...
.
See also
*
General Punctuation
General Punctuation is a Unicode block containing punctuation, spacing, and formatting characters for use with all scripts and writing systems. Included are the defined-width spaces, joining formats, directional formats, smart quotes, archaic ...
(Unicode block)
References
{{typography-stub
Punctuation