Quotation marks

“The best investments today”, according to Smith, “are commodities and emerging-market stocks”. “The best investments today,” according to Smith, “are commodities and emerging-market stocks.” Find the quotation you need on our sister site funnyQuotation.com. (2) Quotation marks to signify so-called or alleged (4) To show that a word refers to the word itself not the word’s meaning.
This usage can be confused with ironic or altered-usage quotation, sometimes with unintended humor. Quotation marks can also set off a nickname embedded in an actual name, or a false or ironic title embedded in an actual title; for example, Nat “King” Cole, Frank “Chairman of the Board” Sinatra, or Simone Rizzo “Sam the Plumber” DeCavalcante. Quotation marks, rather than italics, are generally used for the titles of shorter works. A publisher’s or author’s style may take precedence over regional general preferences. When this practice was abandoned, the empty margin remained, leaving the modern form of indented block quotation.

  • Different varieties and styles of English have different conventions regarding whether terminal punctuation should be written inside or outside the quotation marks.
  • Also, any punctuation otherwise required by the structure of the sentence is placed outside the single quotation marks.
  • The quotation can be introduced with a transitional phrase followed by a comma, helping separate the spoken words from the rest of the sentence.
  • In Portugal, angular quotation marks (ex. «quote») are traditionally used.
  • The curved quotation marks, as well as the straight single quotation mark, are permitted.
  • Quotation marksA are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase.

In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas, also known informally as quotes, talking marks, speech marks, quote marks, quotemarks or speechmarks, are punctuation marks placed on either side of a word or phrase in order to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name. When the material being quoted contains a quotation within a quotation (i.e., something in single quotation marks), use double quotation marks. In all major forms of English, question marks, exclamation marks, semicolons, and any other punctuation (with the possible exceptions of periods and commas, as explained in the sections below) are placed inside or outside the closing quotation mark depending on whether they are part of the quoted material. When a run-in quotation contains quotation marks within the quoted material itself, use single quotation marks in their place. Most large newspapers have kept these low-high quotation marks, „ and ”; otherwise, the alternative form with single or double English-style quotes is now often the only form seen in printed matter.

Specific language features

Since curved quotes are the typographically correct ones,citation needed word processors have traditionally offered curved quotes to users (at minimum as available characters). Most computer keyboards do not have specific keys for curved quotation marks or angled quotation marks. Using this character as the opening quote gave a typographic approximation of curved single quotes. Instead, to limit the number of characters (and keys) required, straight quotation marks were invented spinorhino casino as a compromise. When typewriter keyboards were designed, curved quotation marks were not implemented. Different typefaces, character encodings and computer languages use various encodings and glyphs for quotation marks.

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  • To indicate the measurement correctly, place the marks directly after the number with no space.
  • Use a semicolon inside quotation marks when it’s part of the quoted material.
  • While American style has periods and commas going inside single and double quotation marks, question marks follow logic.
  • In that case, it begins with a lowercase letter, even if the original sentence begins with a capitalized letter.
  • Such insertion of continuation quotation marks was rigidly maintained, even at a word hyphenation break.
  • In the TeX typesetting program, left double quotes are produced by typing two back-ticks (“) and right double quotes by typing two apostrophes (”).

These same systems often drew the backtick (the free standing character U+0060 ` GRAVE ACCENT) as an ‘open quote’ glyph (usually a mirror image so it still sloped in the direction of a grave accent). The Unicode standard introduced a separate character U+2015 ― HORIZONTAL BAR to be used as a quotation dash. In addition to being standard for second level quotes, guillemet quotes are sometimes used as first level quotes in headings and titles, but almost never for ordinary text in paragraphs. Guillemet marks pointing inwards are used for highlights and in case a quotation occurs inside a quotation.

To signal the titles of creative works

Another style of quoting is to use an em-dash to open a quote; this is used almost exclusively for quoting dialogues rather than for single statements, and is virtually always the one used for that purpose in works of fiction. In Polish printed books and publications, this dictionary-recommended style for guillemets (also known as »German quotes«) is used almost exclusively. Guillemet marks pointing outwards are used for definitions (mainly in scientific publications and dictionaries), as well as for enclosing spoken lines and indirect speech, especially in poetic texts. But the most frequent convention used in printed books for nested quotations is to style them in italics.

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A closing quotation mark, », is added to the beginning of each new paragraph within a quotation. (For other languages employing dashes, see section Quotation dash below.) The dashes may be used entirely without quotation marks as well. The French news site L’Humanité uses straight quotation marks along with angle ones. The use of English quotation marks is increasing in French and usually follows English rules, for instance in situations when the keyboard or the software context doesn’t allow the use of guillemets. Neutral (straight) quotation marks, ” and ‘, are used widely, especially in texts typed on computers and on websites.
Since the 2000s, the plain quotes have become more common.citation needed The 2013 revision of the SI-1452 standard for Hebrew keyboard, available since 2012 in Windows 8 and in desktop Linux systems, supports both systems, as does the Gboard keyboard for touchscreen devices. In Israel, the traditional practice in printing and handwriting is to use „low-high” quote marks. Since these continuation marks are obsolete in French, there is no support for automatic insertion of continuation guillemets in HTML or CSS, nor in word-processors. With this older style there was also not necessarily any distinction of shape between the opening and closing guillemets; both often pointed to the right (as today’s French closing guillemets do).citation needed A line-break should not be allowed between the en-dash and the first word of the quotation. The symbol used as the left (typographical) quote in English is used as the right quote in Germany and Austria and a “low double comma” „ (not used in English) is used for the left quote.

Quotation marks

Here, we explain the must-know guidelines for proper quotation mark usage, including examples for each. Thus, to represent curly quotes in XML and SGML, it is safest to use the decimal numeric character references. “Smart quotes” features wrongly convert initial apostrophes (as in ’tis, ’em, ’til, and ’89) into opening single quotes. Performance by these “smart quotes” features was far from perfect overall (variance potential by e.g. subject matter, formatting/style convention, user typing habits). Before Unicode was widely accepted and supported, this meant representing the curved quotes in whatever 8-bit encoding the software and underlying operating system was using. In Finnish, the beginning of a reporting clause is marked only by the punctuation already existing in the sentence, or (if there was none) by adding a comma.
In this case, it is necessary to set the translation off with commas. In the previous sentence, “letter” was properly spelled with two “t”s. Though marshaling little evidence, the authors claim that “over half of British prisoners come from single-parent households.” In her closing statement, the prosecutor spoke forcefully of the defendant’s “callous disregard for human life.”

Some websites do not allow typographic quotation marks or apostrophes in posts. This is a continuation of a typewriter tradition of using ticks for opening quotation marks; see Quotation mark § Typewriters and early computers. 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 an em dash, requires that there be no space. Americans tend to apply quotations when signifying doubt of veracity (sarcastically or seriously), to imply another meaning to a word or to imply a cynical take on a paraphrased quotation, without punctuation at all. According to the Jargon File from 1983, American hackers (members of a subculture of enthusiastic programmers) switched to what they later discovered to be the British quotation system because placing a period inside a quotation mark can change the meaning of data strings that are meant to be typed character-for-character. It is also similar to the use of quotation marks in many other languages (including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, Dutch and German).