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Guillemets (/ˈɡɪləmɛt/, also UK: /ˈɡiːmeɪ/, US: /ˌɡiː(j)əˈmeɪ, ˌɡɪləˈmɛt/, French: [ɡijəmɛ]) are a pair of punctuation marks in the form of sideways double chevrons, « and », used as quotation marks in a number of languages. In some of these languages, "single" guillemets, ‹ and ›, are used for a quotation inside another quotation. Guillemets are not conventionally used in English.

Terminology

Guillemets may also be called angle, Latin, Castilian, Spanish, or French quotes/quotation marks.

Guillemet is a diminutive of the French name Guillaume, 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.

In Adobe software, its file format specifications, and in all fonts derived from these that contain the characters, the glyph names are incorrectly spelled guillemotleft and guillemotright (a malapropism: guillemot is actually a species of seabird). Adobe has acknowledged the error. Likewise, X11 mistakenly uses XK_guillemotleft and XK_guillemotright to name keys producing the characters.

Shape

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

Uses

As quotation marks

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

• Albanian
• Arabic
• Armenian
• Azerbaijani (mostly in the Cyrillic script)
• Belarusian
• Breton
• Bulgarian (rarely used; „...“ is official)
• Catalan
• Chinese (《 and 》 are used to indicate a book or album title)
• 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 (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, 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)

Ditto mark

In Quebec, the right-hand guillemet, », called a guillemet itératif, is used as a ditto mark.

UML

Guillemets are used in Unified Modeling Language to indicate a stereotype of a standard element.

Mail merge

Microsoft Word uses guillemets when creating mail merges. Microsoft use these punctuation marks to denote a mail merge "field", such as «Title», «AddressBlock» or «GreetingLine». On the final printout, the guillemet-marked tags are replaced by each instance of the corresponding data item intended for that field by the user.

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).

The ISO 8859 locations were inherited by Unicode, which added the single guillemets at new locations:

• U+00AB « LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
• U+00BB » RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
• U+2039 ‹ SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
• U+203A › SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK

Despite their names, the characters are mirrored when used in right-to-left contexts.

Keyboard entry

The double guillemets are standard keys on French Canadian QWERTY keyboards and some others.

1. OEM code page set to CP437 or CP850
2. ANSI code page set to CP1252
3. This applies to all English-language keyboard layouts supplied with the Apple operating system, e.g. "Australian", "British", "Canadian", "Irish", "Irish Extended", "U.S." and "U.S. Extended". Other language layouts may differ.

See also

• A related pair of symbols, 'angle brackets' (a single chevron), ⟨ and ⟩, is used for another purpose, in mathematics and computing.
• Chevron
• Computer keyboard
• Quotation mark

References

1. "guillemet". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.). HarperCollins. Retrieved 7 June 2019.
2. "Guillemet". Collins English Dictionary. HarperCollins. Retrieved 7 June 2019.
3. "guillemet". Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 2020-03-03.
4. "guillemet". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 7 June 2019.
5. "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.
6. Trésor de la langue française informatisé – guillemet
7. 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.
8. "Pieturzīmes lietišķajos rakstos. Pēdiņas. — teorija. Latviešu valoda, 12. Klase".
9. Mesaroš, Franjo (1985). Tipografski priručnik. p. 179.
10. "Banque de dépannage linguistique: Guillemets itératifs" [Linguistic help desk: Iterative quotes] (in French). Office québécois de la langue française. Retrieved 30 December 2019.

External links

• Punctuation
• Typographical symbols