Guillemet


Guillemets are a pair of punctuation marks in the form of sideways double chevrons, and, sometimes used as quotation marks or ditto marks. When used as quotation marks, single guillemets, and, are used for nested quotations. Guillemets are not conventionally used in English.

Terminology

Guillemets are also called French quotes, French quotation marks, angle quotation marks, or duckfoot quotes.
Guillemet is a diminutive of the French name Guillaume, apparently after the French printer and punchcutter Guillaume Le Bé, though he did not invent the symbols: they first appear in a 1527 book printed by Josse Bade.
Both Adobe Postscript and the X Window System misspelled the symbol as "guillemot" and wrote these misspellings into symbols used in computer file formats so they cannot be fixed.

Shape

Guillemets are smaller than less-than and greater-than signs, which in turn are smaller than angle brackets.
File:Guillemets in different fonts with italics.svg|frame|left|Guillemets in a Helvetica Neue, Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri, Cambria, DejaVu Serif and Courier New "regular" font with their italics counterparts
File:Angle brackets and less+greater signs and half guillemets in different fonts.svg|frame|left|Angle brackets, less-than/greater-than signs and single guillemets in Cambria, DejaVu Serif, Andron Mega Corpus, Andika and Everson Mono

Use as quotation marks

Guillemets are used pointing outwards to indicate speech in these languages and regions:
Guillemets are used pointing inwards to indicate speech in these languages:
Guillemets are used pointing right to indicate speech in these languages:
Double guillemets are present in many 8-bit extended ASCII character sets. They were at 0xAE and 0xAF in CP437 on the IBM PC, and 0xC7 and 0xC8 in Mac OS Roman, and placed in several of ISO 8859 code pages at 0xAB and 0xBB.
Microsoft added the single guillemets to CP1252 and similar sets used in Windows at 0x8B and 0x9B .

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 right-to-left contexts.