Guillemet
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GuillemetsTemplate:Notetag are a pair of punctuation marks in the form of sideways double chevrons, Template:Char and Template:Char, sometimes used as quotation marks or ditto marks.[1] When used as quotation marks, single guillemets, Template:Char and Template:Char, are used for nested quotations. Guillemets are not conventionally used in English.
Terminology
Guillemets are also called French quotes,[2] French quotation marks,[3] angle quotation marks,[4] or duckfoot quotes.[5]
Guillemet is a diminutive of the French name Script error: No such module "Lang"., apparently after the French printer and punchcutter Guillaume Le Bé (1525–1598),[3] though he did not invent the symbols: they first appear in a 1527 book printed by Josse Bade.[6]
Both Adobe PostScript[7] and the X Window System[8] 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
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Guillemets are used pointing outwards («like this») to indicate speech in these languages and regions:
- Albanian
- Arabic
- Armenian
- Asturian
- Azerbaijani (mostly in the Cyrillic script)
- Belarusian
- Breton
- Bulgarian (used before 1990, now rarely used; „...“ is official)
- Catalan
- Esperanto (usage varies)
- Estonian (marked usage; „...“ prevails)
- Franco-Provençal
- French (spaced out by thin spaces « like this », except no spaces in Switzerland)
- Galician
- Greek
- Italian
- Khmer
- Northern Korean (in Southern Korean, “...” is used)
- Kurdish
- Latvian[9] (stūrainās pēdiņas)
- Norwegian
- Persian
- Portuguese (used mostly in European Portuguese, due to its presence in typical computer keyboards; considered obsolete in Brazilian Portuguese)
- Romanian; only to indicate a quotation within a quotation
- Russian, and some languages of the former Soviet Union using Cyrillic script („...“ 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
- Ukrainian
- Uzbek (mostly in the Cyrillic script)
- Vietnamese (previously, now “...” is official)
Guillemets are used pointing inwards (»like this«) to indicate speech in these languages:
- Croatian (preferred by typographers,[10] 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:
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Despite their names, the characters are mirrored when used in right-to-left contexts.
See also
- Similar-looking punctuation marks:
- Angle brackets, Template:Char and Template:Char, are a type of brackets that are mainly used in specialist settings, such as mathematics and linguistics
- Title marks, typically Template:Char and Template:Char but also Template:Char and Template:Char, are used in Chinese to denote the name of a book, film, newspaper, and other types of works
- Template:Anli (as an insignia)
- Template:Anli
Notes
References
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- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Banque de dépannage linguistique: Guillemets itératifs" [Linguistic help desk: Iterative quotes] (in French). Office québécois de la langue française. Retrieved 30 December 2019.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link) - ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."guillemets français" [French guillemets]. Grand dictionnaire terminologique (GDT) [Grand Terminological Dictionary] (in français). Quebec Office of the French Language (OQLF). 2019. Archived from the original on 2025-01-17. Retrieved 14 December 2025.
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- ^ a b Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Character design standards, Latin 1: Punctuation Design Standards. § Pointing quotation marks – Guillemets". Microsoft Typography. Archived from the original on 2012-11-03. Retrieved 2020-06-12.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Character Name Index". Unicode. Archived from the original on 2025-10-22. Retrieved 14 December 2025. E.g. "ANGLE QUOTATION MARK, LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE : 00AB"
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Collinswas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Trésor de la langue française informatisé – guillemet
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Adobe Systems Inc. (1999). PostScript Language Reference: The Red Book (3rd ed.). Addison Wesley. Character set endnote 3, page 783. ISBN 978-0-201-37922-8. OCLC 40927139.
- ^ keysymdef.h
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Pieturzīmes lietišķajos rakstos. Pēdiņas. — teorija. Latviešu valoda, 12. Klase". Archived from the original on 2022-10-06. Retrieved 2022-12-08.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Mesaroš, Franjo (1985). Tipografski priručnik. p. 179.
External links
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