Quotation marks (“ ”)

How to read it

The American Heritage Dictionary defines them as a pair of marks used to begin and end a passage repeated word for word from another person, and also to give meanings or glosses and to mark a word whose status is unusual or doubtful. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary lists inverted commas as the British English name, alongside quotation marks, quotes, quote marks and speech marks, and records “in inverted commas” as an informal way of saying a word is not true or appropriate. In Unicode the curly pairs are U+201C and U+201D for double quotes and U+2018 and U+2019 for single, which the code charts call the “preferred characters in English for paired quotation marks”. The straight keyboard character, U+0022 QUOTATION MARK, is in the standard’s words “mainly appropriate for typewritten manuscripts, programming text, or similar usage”. The closing single quote is the same character as the Apostrophe (’) (CMOS Shop Talk).

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Single or double: American and British style

The two styles go back to the house rules of two university presses. CMOS Shop Talk’s Russell Harper writes that Oxford University Press used single quotation marks, keeping double ones for quotes within quotes, and the University of Chicago Press did the opposite, a split still observed today. Chicago itself notes that British newspapers often use double marks: the Guardian puts double quotes round quoted words, single ones inside them, and single quotes in headlines and captions. GOV.UK reverses the pattern, keeping double quotes for words someone actually said or wrote and single quotes for unusual terms, titles and the names of buttons. Cambridge Dictionary’s grammar says single quotation marks are becoming more common in direct speech.

Full stops and commas: inside or outside?

In Chicago style, commas and periods go before the closing quote, “like this,” and every other mark goes outside unless it belongs to the quotation. Harper traces the split to 1905: nearly every work published in English before then put commas and full stops inside, and that year’s Hart’s Rules for Oxford called it “a bad practice” and placed them according to the sense. Chicago’s first edition answered in 1906, “Put the period inside the quotation marks. (This is a rule without exception.)”, and in 1937 it gave the reason as “appearance’ sake”: commas and periods sit on the baseline, under the raised quotation mark, rather than beside it.

The rules still differ in detail. The US Government Publishing Office’s Style Manual puts the comma and final period inside, but in amendments to legislation and court work with quoted language it puts them outside when they are not part of the quotation. The Guardian puts full stops and commas inside only for a complete quoted sentence. British fiction keeps the comma inside in interrupted dialogue, Harper notes, so in a novel the two styles place that comma the same way.

In other languages

Unicode describes how quotation marks change across Europe. German, Czech and Slovak open with a low mark („) and close with a raised one; Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish use the same right-hand mark to open and close; French, Greek and Russian, among others, use guillemets (« »), and French puts a space between them and the quoted text.

Look-alikes

The straight double quote " on keyboards does duty for the curly marks and for the double prime ″, the inch and seconds mark (see inch and foot marks). Unicode cross-refers " to the ditto mark 〃 (U+3003) and to the Hebrew gershayim ״ (U+05F4), which it prefers when writing Hebrew. The single and double angle marks ‹ › and « » are guillemets, not the less-than and greater-than signs.