Quotation mark

quotation mark; ending quotation mark; starting and ending quotation mark

das anführungszeichen; das abführungszeichen; zeichen zur an- und abführung

guillemet

Form and use of quotation marks
Shape of quotation marks
A bon mot
Sources
Links
Notes

Languages and countires have their distinct typographic conventions. So you will not be surprised to see different glyphs for the quotation in different languages.

The French name of these symbols (guillemets) is derived from the name Guillaume who is supposed to have invented the French forms [according to a French etymological dictionary]. This name is used at least since 1677.

Form and use of quotation marks

For most languages two forms are defined: a primary and an alternative form.

• The primary form is used for quotations
• The alternative form is used for definitions and nested quotations. For example ¹⁾: «Wir wollen keine "hacker" in unseren datennetzen!»

When mixing languages, the quotation mark must match with the quoted language, not with the quoting language. See the example in the preceeding paragraph.

Quotation marks for some languages

To avoid problems with the settings in your browser, the following table shows the glyps as images. The font Times Roman was used for the images, as this font shows the shapes very clearly. Please note the white space between the quotation marks and the enclosed text in some cases.

To describe the shape (for example in ISO standards) comparison to larger shapes are used, such as the figures 6 and 9. See the alternative texts to the images below.

Quotation marks	Usage	HTML entities for both marks in the image1)
	Typewriting, computing, in tables and the like to substitute the contents of the previous line. In German this form is called gänsefüsschen. Only Unicode provides a correct symbol for this, called Ditto Mark, code U3003, 〃 (〃)	" / " " / "
	Typewriting, computing	' '
	Germany, Austria, Switzerland (handwriting) Alternative form in Denmark and Norway	„ / „ / „ “ / “
	Alternative form in The Netherlands	„ / „ / „ ” / ”
	Alternative form in Germany	‚ / ‚ / ‚ ‘ / ‘
	Alternative form in USA and Great Britain	‘ / ‘ ’ / &#8217
	USA, Great Britain, Spain Alternative form in Portugal	“ / “ ” / ”
	Alternative form in Italy	“ / “ „ / „ / „
	The Netherlands Alternative form in Sweden	” / ” ” / ”
	Norway, Portugal, Switzerland (printed matters) Alternative form in Spain	« / « » / »
	France, Italy
	Denmark Alternative form in Germany	» / » « / «
	Sweden	» / » » / »
	Alternative form in Switzerland	‹ / ‹ / ‹ › / › / ›
	Alternative form in France
	Alternative form in Germany and Austria	› / › / › ‹ / ‹ / ‹

Shape of quotation marks

The shape of quotation marks (except the French guillemets) is derived from the comma. Hence some people (non typographers) call them high comma... The shape varies of course depending on font style:

Bon mot

In the font encoding vector of PostScript fonts the name of the symbols shaped like chevrons is misspelled. Eventually Adobe committed this fault:

It should be noted that the character names guillemotleft and guillemotright are misspelled. A guillemot is a species of sea bird. The correct spelling for these punctuation characters is guillemet. However, the misspelled names are the ones actually used in the fonts and encodings containing these characters.

Sources

Jürgen Gulbins, Christine Kahrmann: Mut zur Typographie, Springer Verlag 1993; ISBN 3-540-55708-3

Further links

• SelfHTML
  Liste aller Sonderzeichen in: Stefan Münz; HTML-Dateien selbst erstellen, Das Kompendium für Entwickler von WWW-Seiten.
• HTML 4.0 specification
  Chapter 24 gives information on the Character entity references in HTML 4.0 (which were valid since HTML 2).
• XHTML entity test
  With these tables with Latin-1 Characters, Special Characters and Symbols you may check the capabilities of your browser and the font yu are using in it.
• Quotation mark glyphs
  Different typefaces, character encodings and computer languages use various encodings and glyphs for quotation marks. This Wikipedia article lists some of these glyphs along with their Unicode code points and HTML entities.
• Quotation mark, non-English usage
  This Wikipedia article provides an overview over various languages and extends my table (which was created years before Wikipedia came to life).
• Commonly confused characters
  With the advent of desktop publishing in the 1980's, typesetting suddenly changed from a spectator sport to participatory. Along with this, a lot of the subtleties got lost for many. A lot of people didn't know they were missing these details, and a lot of programs didn't let you do anything about it even if you did.

Notes

 

1. HTML entitites #130 ... #159 are not defined in HTML standards (since no assignment is defined in UNICODE) and are rendered correctly only in Netscape Communicator 4.x and MS Internet Explorer. Correct entity names would be from the UNICODE set. E.g. #130 ➔ #8218. For simplicity I have used the NS/IE forms on this page.