Quotation Marks

Typographic curly quotes versus straight typewriter keys

One of the clearest hallmarks of professional publishing is the correct use of typographical quotation marks—often called "smart quotes" or "curly quotes"—instead of standard typewriter straight quotes. The straight single quote (') and double quote (") on computer keyboards are legacy compromises from nineteenth-century mechanical typewriters, which combined opening quotes, closing quotes, apostrophes, and prime symbols into two shared keys to save keyboard space.

In fine book design and editorial typography, opening and closing quotes are distinct glyphs with directional curves. The left double quotation mark “ (U+201C) curves open, while the right double quotation mark ” (U+201D) curves closed. The right single quote ’ (U+2019) also serves as the true typographical apostrophe. To compare quotes with other marks, consult our punctuation symbols directory, check sentence rules in dash symbols, or explore parenthetical styling in bracket symbols.

International punctuation styles across Europe and East Asia

Quotation mark conventions vary dramatically across languages and cultures. While English typography favors raised double curly quotes (“quote”), French, Italian, and Spanish traditions favor angle-bracket guillemets: « citation ». In French typography, a non-breaking space is placed inside each guillemet: « exemple ».

German and Austrian publications use low opening quotes shaped like the number 99 resting on the baseline, paired with high closing quotes shaped like 66: „Zitat“. In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literature, typographers traditionally employ corner brackets: 「 quotation 」 for dialogue and double corner brackets 『 title 』 for book titles.

HTML character entities and coding quote escaping

In programming languages like JavaScript and HTML, straight quotes delimit strings and attributes, meaning unescaped quotes can cause syntax errors. In web development, you can render curly quotes safely without encoding conflicts using standard HTML character entities: “ for “, ” for ”, ‘ for ‘, and ’ for ’. For French guillemets, use « for « and » for ».