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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», sometimes used asquotation marks orditto marks.[5] When used as quotation marks, single guillemets,‹ and›, are used for nested quotations. Guillemets are not conventionally used inEnglish.
Guillemets are also calledFrench quotes,[6]French quotation marks,[7]angle quotation marks,[8] orduckfoot quotes.[2]
Guillemet is adiminutive of the French nameGuillaume, apparently after the Frenchprinter andpunchcutterGuillaume Le Bé (1525–1598),[7] though he did not invent the symbols: they first appear in a 1527 book printed byJosse Bade.[9]
BothAdobe Postscript[10] and theX Window System[11] misspelled the symbol as "guillemot" (a type of seabird) and wrote these misspellings into symbols used in computer file formats so they cannot be fixed.
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:
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.
anglais : Termes : French quotation marks, French quote marks, French quotes
