Guillemet

 ( Punctuation ) 

Guillemets (, also , , ) are a pair of punctuation marks in the form of sideways double chevrons, and , used as in some languages. In some of these languages, "single" guillemets, and , are used for a quotation inside another quotation. Guillemets are not conventionally used in English language.

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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 printing and punchcutter Guillaume Le Bé (1525–1598), though he did not invent the symbols: they first appear in a 1527 book printed by Jodocus Badius. Trésor de la langue française informatisé – guillemet

In Adobe software, its file format specifications, and in all fonts derived from these that contain the characters, the glyph names are incorrectly spelled and (a malapropism: guillemot is actually a species of seabird). Adobe has acknowledged the error.

Likewise, X11 mistakenly uses and to name keys producing the characters.

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Shape Guillemets are smaller than less-than sign and greater-than signs, which in turn are smaller than .

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Uses

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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 language
• Bulgarian (rarely used; „...“ is official)
• Catalan language
• Chinese language (《 and 》 are used to indicate a book or album title)
• Esperanto (usage varies)
• Estonian (marked usage; „...“ prevails)
• Franco-Provençal
• French language (spaced out by « like this  », except no spaces in Switzerland)
• Galician
• Greek language
• Italian language
• Khmer language
• Northern Korean language (in Southern Korean, “...” is used)
• Kurdish
• Latvian language ( stūrainās pēdiņas)
• Norwegian
• Persian language
• 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 language, and some languages of the former Soviet Union using Cyrillic script („...“ is also used for nested quotes and in hand-written text.)
• Spanish language (uncommon in daily usage, but commonly used in publishing)
• Swiss languages
• Turkish language (dated usage; almost entirely replaced with “...” by late 20th century)
• Uyghur language
• Ukrainian
• Uzbek language (mostly in the Uzbek alphabet)
• 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 language (traditional but declining usage; „...“ prevails)
• Danish language (“...” is also used)
• Esperanto (very uncommon)
• German language (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 language (used to indicate a quote inside a quote as defined by dictionaries; more common usage in practice. See also: Polish orthography)
• Serbian language (marked usage; „...“ prevails)
• Slovak language (traditional but declining usage; „...“ prevails)
• Slovene language („...“ and “...” also used)
• Swedish language (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 language (”...” is the common and correct form)
• Swedish language (this style, and »...« are considered typographically fancy; ”...” is the common form of quotation)

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

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

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Mail merge Microsoft Word uses guillemets when creating . Microsoft use these punctuation marks to denote a mail merge "field", such as , or . 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.

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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).

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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 text direction contexts.

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See also

• A related pair of symbols, 'angle brackets' (a single chevron), and , is used for another purpose, in mathematics and computing.
• (as an insignia)

• , such as the guillemets

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External links

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