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Guillemets | |
| U+00AB «LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK («) U+00BB »RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK (») |
Guillemets (/ˈɡɪləmɛt/,[1][2]alsoUK:/ˈɡiːmeɪ/,[3]US:/ˌɡiː(j)əˈmeɪ,ˌɡɪləˈmɛt/,[4]French:[ɡij(ə)mɛ]) are a pair ofpunctuation marks in the form of sideways doublechevrons,« and», used asquotation marks in some languages. In some of these languages, "single" guillemets,‹ and›, are used for a quotation inside another quotation. Guillemets are not conventionally used inEnglish.
Guillemets may also be calledangle,Latin,Castilian,Spanish, orFrench quotes/quotation marks.[citation needed]
Guillemet is adiminutive of the French nameGuillaume, apparently after the Frenchprinter andpunchcutterGuillaume Le Bé (1525–1598),[5] though he did not invent the symbols: they first appear in a 1527 book printed byJosse Bade.[6]
InAdobe software, its file format specifications, and in all fonts derived from these that contain the characters, the glyph names are incorrectly spelledguillemotleft andguillemotright (amalapropism:guillemot is actually a species of seabird). Adobe has acknowledged the error.[7] Likewise,X11 mistakenly usesXK_guillemotleft andXK_guillemotright to name keys producing the characters.
Guillemets are smaller thanless-than andgreater-than signs, which in turn are smaller thanangle brackets.
Guillemets are used pointing outwards («like this») to indicate speech in these languages and regions:
Guillemets are used pointing inwards (»like this«) to indicate speech in these languages:
Guillemets are used pointing right (»like this») to indicate speech in these languages:
In Quebec, the right-hand guillemet,», called aguillemet itératif, is used as aditto mark.[10]
Guillemets are used inUnified Modeling Language to indicate astereotype of a standard element.
Microsoft Word uses guillemets when creatingmail 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.
Double guillemets are present in many 8-bitextended ASCII character sets. They were at 0xAE and 0xAF (174 and 175) inCP437 on the IBM PC, and 0xC7 and 0xC8 inMac OS Roman, and placed in several ofISO 8859 code pages (namely:-1,-7,-8,-9,-13,-15,-16) at 0xAB and 0xBB (171 and 187).
Microsoft added the single guillemets toCP1252 and similar sets used in Windows at 0x8B and 0x9B (139 and 155) (where the ISO standard placedC1 control codes).
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 inright-to-left contexts.
