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Guillemet

Guillemets (, <small>also</small> , , ) are a pair of punctuation marks in the form of sideways double chevrons, and , sometimes used as quotation marks or ditto marks. When used as quotation marks, single guillemets, and , are used for nested quotations. Guillemets are not conventionally used in English.

Terminology

Guillemets are also called French quotes, French quotation marks, angle quotation marks, or duckfoot quotes.

Guillemet is a diminutive of the French name , apparently after the French printer and punchcutter Guillaume Le Bé (1525–1598), though he did not invent the symbols: they first appear in a 1527 book printed by Josse Bade.

Both Adobe Postscript and the X Window System misspelled the symbol as "guillemot" (a type of seabird) and wrote these misspellings into symbols used in computer file formats so they cannot be fixed.

Shape

Guillemets are smaller than less-than and greater-than signs, which in turn are smaller than angle brackets.

Use as quotation marks

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

Guillemets are used pointing inwards (»like this«) to indicate speech in these languages:

  • Croatian (preferred by typographers, alternate pair „...“ is in common use)
  • Czech (traditional but declining usage; „...“ prevails)
  • Danish (“...” is also used)
  • Esperanto (very uncommon)
  • German (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)
  • 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)

Encoding

Double guillemets are present in many 8-bit extended ASCII 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 code pages (namely: -1, -7, -8, -9, -13, -15, -16) at 0xAB and 0xBB (171 and 187).

Microsoft added the single guillemets to CP1252 and similar sets used in Windows at 0x8B and 0x9B (139 and 155) (where the ISO standard placed C1 control codes).

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 contexts.

See also

  • Similar-looking punctuation marks:
  • Angle brackets, and , are a type of brackets that are mainly used in specialist settings, such as mathematics and linguistics
  • Title marks, typically and but also and , are used in Chinese to denote the name of a book, film, newspaper, and other types of works
  • (as an insignia)

References

External links