Quotation marks or inverted commas (also called quotes and speech marks) are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech, a quotation, a phrase or a word. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character. The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ...

They have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media:

• For languages other than English see Quotation mark, non-English usage
• For the various glyphs used in computer languages to define quotation marks see Quotation mark glyphs

For those fragments of a human expression placed inside quotation marks see Quotation. Quotation marks, also called quotes, speech marks or inverted commas, are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech, a quotation, or a phrase. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... For the Wikipedia quotation templates, see Category:Quotation templates. ...

Usage

Quotations and speech

Single or double quotation marks are used to denote either speech or a quotation. Neither style is an absolute rule, though double quotes are preferred in the United States and single quotes in the United Kingdom. A publisher’s or even an author’s style may take precedence over national general preferences. The important rule is that the style of opening and closing quotes must be matched.

‘Good morning, Dave,’ greeted HAL.

“Good morning, Dave,” greeted HAL.

For speech within speech, the other is used as inner quotation marks.

‘HAL said, “Good morning, Dave,” ’ recalled Frank.

“HAL said, ‘Good morning, Dave,’ ” recalled Frank.

Omitting quotes is generally not recommended.

Sometimes, quotations are nested in more levels than inner and outer quotation. Nesting levels up to five can be found in the Bible.^[1] In these cases, questions arise about the form (and names) of the quotation marks to be used. The most common way is to simply alternate between the two forms. This Gutenberg Bible is displayed by the United States Library of Congress. ...

“…‘…“…‘ …   … ’…”…’…”

If such a passage is further quoted in another publication, then all of their forms have to be shifted over by one level.

In most cases, quotations that span multiple paragraphs should be block-quoted, and thus do not require quotation marks. Quotation marks are used for multiple-paragraph quotations in some cases, especially in narratives. The convention in English is to give the first and each subsequent paragraph opening quotes, using closing quotes only for the final paragraph of the quotation. The Spanish convention, though similar, uses closing quotes at the beginning of all subsequent paragraphs beyond the first. Image File history File links Quotation_Marks. ... A pilcrow is used to indicate a paragraph. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

When quoted text is interrupted, such as with the phrase he said, a closing quotation mark is used before the interruption, and an opening quotation mark after. Commas are also often used before and after the interruption, more often for quotations of speech than for quotations of text. The term comma has various uses; comma is the name used for one of the punctuation symbols: , The term comma is also used in music theory for various small intervals that arise as differences between approximately equal intervals. ...

“HAL,” noted Frank, “said that everything was going extremely well.”

It is generally considered incorrect to use quotation marks for paraphrased speech. A Paraphrase is a statement or remark explained in other words or another way, so as to simplify or clarify its meaning. ...

If HAL says: “All systems are functional.”

Wrong: HAL said that “Everything was going extremely well.”

Right: HAL said that everything was going extremely well.

Right: HAL said, “All systems are functional.”

However, another convention when quoting text in the body of a paragraph or sentence, especially in philosophical essays, is to recognise double quotation marks as marking an exact quote, and single quotation marks as marking a paraphrased quote or a quote where pronouns or plurality have been changed in order to fit the sentence containing the quote.

Irony

Another important use of quotation marks is to indicate or call attention to ironic or apologetic words. Ironic quotes can also be called scare, sneer, shock, or distance quotes. Ironic quotes are sometimes gestured in oral speech using air quotes: Irony is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is a gap or incongruity between what a speaker or a writer says and what is generally understood (either at the time, or in the later context of history). ... Scare quotes are quotation marks used for purposes other than to identify a direct quotation, mostly as a flag to provoke in the reader a negative association for the word enclosed in the quotes. ... AIR QUOTES ARE ANNOYING! SAYS WHO? SAYS ME! FUCK AIR QUOTES! I HATE THEM! THEYRE JUST SICK VARIANTS OF THE PEACE SIGN! ...

My brother claimed he was too “busy” to help me.

Ironic quotes should be used with care. Without the intonational cues of speech, they could obscure the writer’s intended meaning. They could also be confused easily with quotations. Intonation, in linguistics, is the variation of pitch when speaking. ...

In a similar sense, quotes are also used to indicate that the writer realizes that the word is not being used in its (currently) accepted sense.

In the fifteenth century, we “knew” that the Sun’s revolution divided day from night.

Woody Allen joked, “I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.”

Woody Allen (born Allen Stewart Königsberg on December 1, 1935) is a three-time Academy Award-winning American film director, writer, actor, jazz musician, comedian, and playwright. ...

Emphasis (incorrect)

Quotes are sometimes used incorrectly for emphasis in lieu of underlining or italics, most commonly on signs or placards. This usage can be confused with ironic or altered-usage quotation, sometimes with unintended humor. For example - For sale: “fresh” fish, “fresh” oysters - could be construed to imply that fresh is not used with its everyday meaning, or indeed to indicate that the fish or oysters are anything but fresh. And again - Teller lines open until noon for your “convenience” - might mean that the “convenience” was for the bank employees, not the customers.^{[2] [3] [4] [5]} The word emphasis, in addition to its main dictionary meaning, may have the following techincal meanings. ... A giant grouper at the Georgia Aquarium Fish are aquatic vertebrates that are typically cold-blooded; covered with scales, and equipped with two sets of paired fins and several unpaired fins. ... The name oyster is used for a number of different groups of mollusks which grow for the most part in marine or brackish water. ... A bank teller is an employee of a bank who deals directly with most customers. ... Noon is the time exactly halfway through the day, written 12:00 in the 24-hour clock and 12:00 noon in the 12-hour clock. ... A convenience is a luxury that is intended to save a consumer time or frustration. ...

There is a humorous blog dedicated to this misuse. The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks.

Use-mention distinction

Main article: Use-mention distinction

Either quotes or italic type can emphasize that an instance of a word refers to the word itself rather than its associated concept. The use-mention distinction is the distinction between using a word (or phrase, etc. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... The use-mention distinction is the distinction between using a word (or phrase, etc. ...

Cheese is derived from milk.

“Cheese” is derived from a word in Old English.

Cheese has calcium, protein, and phosphorus.

Cheese has three e’s.

A three-way distinction is occasionally made between normal use of a word (no quotes), referencing the concept behind the word (single quotes), and the word itself (double quotes):

When discussing ‘use’, use “use”.

Titles of artistic works

Quotation marks, rather than italics, are generally used for the titles of shorter works. Whether these are single or double is again a matter of style:

• Short fiction, poetry, etc.: Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinel”
• Book chapters: The first chapter of 3001: The Final Odyssey is “Comet Cowboy”
• Articles in books, magazines, journals, etc.: “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” Wireless World, October 1945
• Album tracks, singles, etc.: David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (born December 16, 1917) is a British science-fiction author and inventor, most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, and for collaborating with director Stanley Kubrick on the film of the same name. ... David Bowie (IPA: []) (born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947) is an English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger and audio engineer. ... Space Oddity is a song written and performed by David Bowie and released as a single in 1969. ...

Nicknames and false titles

Quotation marks are used to offset a nickname embedded in an actual name, or a false or ironic title embedded in an actual title; for example, Nat “King” Cole. // A nickname is a name of a person or thing other than its proper name. ... Nathaniel Adams Coles, known professionally as Nat King Cole (March 17, 1919 – February 15, 1965) was a popular American singer, songwriter, and jazz pianist. ...

History

In early modern English, quote marks were used only to denote pithy comments. They first began to quote direct speech in 1714. By 1749, single quotes or “inverted commas”, were commonly used to denote direct speech. Unlike modern usage, a single open quote was placed at the beginning of each line of multi-line quotations.^[6]

Typographical considerations

Punctuation

The traditional convention in American English is for commas and periods to be included inside the quotation marks, even if they are not part of the quoted sentence, while the British style shows clearly whether or not the punctuation is part of the quoted phrase. The American rule is derived from typesetting while the British rule is grammatical (see below for more explanation). As with many such differences, the American rule follows an older British standard. The typesetter’s rule was standard in early 19th Century Britain; the grammatical rule was advocated by the extremely influential book The King’s English, by Fowler and Fowler. For other uses, see American English (disambiguation). ...

• “Carefree” means “free from care or anxiety.” (American style)
• “Carefree” means “free from care or anxiety”. (British style)
• “Hello, world,” I said. (both styles)

In British style, both single and double quotation marks are possible, but more modern style guides like the BBC’s tend to prefer the latter.

The American English rule is often not applied if the presence of the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks will lead to ambiguity, for example in describing commands to be typed into a computer:

In the File name text field, type “HelloWorldApp.java”, including the quotation marks.^[7]

Before the advent of mechanical type, the order of quotation marks with periods and commas was not given much consideration. The printing press required that the easily damaged smallest pieces of type for the comma and period be protected behind the more robust quotation marks.[1] The US style still adheres to this older tradition in formal writing but usually not in everyday use. Today, most areas of publication conform to one of the two standards above. However, in subjects such as chemistry and software documentation it is conventional to include only the precise quoted string within the quotes. This avoids ambiguity with regard to whether a punctuation mark belongs to the quote:

Enter the URL as “www.wikipedia.org”, the name as “Wikipedia”, and click “OK”.

The URL starts with “www.wikipedia.”. This is followed by “org” or “com”.

In both styles, question marks and exclamation marks are placed inside or outside quoted material on the basis of logic, but colons and semicolons are always placed outside[2]:

Did he say, “Good morning, Dave”?

No, he said, “Where are you, Dave?”

In the first two sentences above, only one punctuation mark is used at the end of each. Regardless of its placement, only one end mark (?, !, or .) can end a sentence in American English.

References: Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition; Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford.

Spacing

In English, when a quotation follows other writing on a line of text, a space precedes the opening quotation mark unless the preceding symbol, such as a dash, requires that there be no space. When a quotation is followed by other writing on a line of text, a space follows the closing quotation mark unless it is immediately followed by other punctuation within the sentence, such as a colon or closing punctuation. These exceptions are ignored by some Asian computer systems that systematically display quotation marks with the included spacing. Note: This article contains special characters. ...

In Chinese, the spacing is irrelevant since all characters, including punctuation, are the same width.

There is generally no space between an opening quotation mark and the following word, or a closing quotation mark and the preceding word. When a double quotation mark or a single quotation mark immediately follows the other, proper spacing for legibility requires that a non-breaking space be inserted. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

So Dave actually said, “He said, ‘Good morning?’ ”

Yes, he did say, “He said, ‘Good morning.’ ”

Non-language related usage

Straight quotes (or italic straight quotes) are often used to approximate the prime and double prime (e.g., when signifying feet and inches, or arcminutes and arcseconds). For instance, 5 feet and 6 inches is often written 5' 6", and 40 degrees, 20 minutes, and 50 seconds is written 40° 20' 50". When available, however, the prime should be used instead (e.g., 5′ 6″, and 40° 20′ 50″). Prime and double prime are not present in most character sets, including ASCII and Latin-1, but are present in Unicode, as characters U+2032 (dec. 8242) and U+2033 (dec. 8243), and as HTML entities ′ and ″. This article is not about the symbol for the set of prime numbers, â„™. The prime (′, Unicode U+2032, ′) is a symbol with many mathematical uses: A complement in set theory: A′ is the complement of the set A A point related to another (e. ... A foot (plural: feet or foot;[1] symbol or abbreviation: ft or, sometimes, ′ – a prime) is a unit of length, in a number of different systems, including English units, Imperial units, and United States customary units. ... An inch (plural: inches; symbol or abbreviation: in or, sometimes, ″ - a double prime) is the name of a unit of length in a number of different systems, including English units, Imperial units, and United States customary units. ... A minute of arc, arcminute, or MOA is a unit of angular measurement, equal to one sixtieth (1/60) of one degree. ... A second of arc or arcsecond is a unit of angular measurement which comprises one-sixtieth of an arcminute, or 1/3600 of a degree of arc or 1/1296000 ≈ 7. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... HTML has been in use since 1991 (note that the W3C international standard is now XHTML), but the first standardized version with a reasonably complete treatment of international characters was version 4. ...

Straight single and double quotes are used in most programming languages to delimit strings or literal characters. In some languages (e.g. Pascal) only one type is allowed, in some (e.g. C and its derivatives) both are used with different meanings and in others (e.g. Python) both are used interchangeably. In many languages, if it is desired to include the same quotes used to delimit a string inside the string, the quotes are doubled. For example to represent the string eat 'hot' dogs in Pascal one uses 'eat ''hot'' dogs'. A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... In computer programming and formal language theory, (and other branches of mathematics), a string is an ordered sequence of symbols. ... Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Pascal Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ... Look up C, c in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Python is a high-level programming language first released by Guido van Rossum in 1991. ...

Glyphs

Main article: Quotation mark glyphs

This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

Notes

See also

• Unicode
• ISO 8859-1
• Scare quotes
• Air quotes
• Quotation mark, non-English usage

Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1, is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding originally developed by ISO, but later jointly maintained by ISO and IEC. The standard, when supplemented with additional character assignments, is the... Scare quotes are quotation marks used for purposes other than to identify a direct quotation, mostly as a flag to provoke in the reader a negative association for the word enclosed in the quotes. ... AIR QUOTES ARE ANNOYING! SAYS WHO? SAYS ME! FUCK AIR QUOTES! I HATE THEM! THEYRE JUST SICK VARIANTS OF THE PEACE SIGN! ... Quotation marks, also called quotes, speech marks or inverted commas, are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech, a quotation, or a phrase. ...

External links

• Curling Quotes in HTML, SGML, and XML
• Beginners guide to quotation marks
• Quotation marks in the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository
• ASCII and Unicode quotation marks – detailed discussion of the ASCII `backquote' problem
• The Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks
• Commonly confused characters
• Smart Quotes

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL. The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC) is an online, searchable encyclopedic dictionary of computing subjects. ... Bold text // “GFDL” redirects here. ...

v • d • e Typography terminology
Page	Pagination · Recto · Verso · Margin · Column · Canons of page construction
Paragraph	Widows and orphans · Leading · River · Baseline · Median · Alignment · Justification
Character	Ligature · Letter-spacing · Kerning · Majuscule · Minuscule · Initial · x-height · Ascender · Descender · Diacritics · Counter
Style	Serif · Italic · Slab serif · Sans-serif · Blackletter · Script · Dingbat
Punctuation	Hanging punctuation · Hyphenation · Curly quotes · En dash · Em dash
Digital typography	Font formats · Typesetting software · Character encoding · Rasterization · Hinting