With narration of direct speech, both styles retain punctuation inside the quotation marks, with a full stop changing into a comma if followed by attributive matter, also known as a speech tag or annunciatory clause. In the United States, the prevailing style is called American style, whereby commas and periods are almost always placed inside closing quotation marks. Periods and commas that are part of the person’s speech are permitted inside the quotation marks regardless of whether the material is fiction.
In Windows, if it is necessary to follow a space with a closing quotation mark when Smart Quotes is in effect, it is usually sufficient to input the character using the Alt code shown above rather than typing ” or ‘. Straight quotation marks are also retronymically called dumb quotes (“…”). There is generally no space between an opening quotation mark and the following word, or a closing quotation mark and the preceding word. In journals and newspapers, quotation mark double/single use often depends on the individual publication’s house style. British usage does vary, with some authoritative sources such as The Economist and The Times recommending the same usage as in the US, whereas other authoritative sources, such as The King’s English, Fowler’s, and New Hart’s Rules, recommend single quotation marks. For example, the journal Language of the Linguistic Society of America requires that the closing quotation mark precede the period or comma unless that period or comma is “a necessary part of the quoted matter”.

Scare quotes

(1) To identify previously spoken or written words. This includes individual words, phrases, or separate clauses. However, no capitalization is necessary if you’re not quoting a complete sentence. In that case, it begins with a lowercase letter, even if the original sentence begins with a capitalized letter.

• French news sites such as Libération, Les Échos and Le Figaro do not add manual spacing, leaving it up to localization and the browser to space the guillemets properly.
• A period can be used to introduce a block quotation when the introductory text stands on its own as a complete sentence.
• When quoted text is interrupted, such as with the phrase he said, a closing quotation mark is used before the interruption, and an opening quotation mark after.
• 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.
• Until then, literal quotations had been highlighted or not at the author’s discretion.

Run-in quotations

By contrast, American English typically uses double quotation marks to identify the outermost text of a primary quotation versus single quotation marks for inner, nested quotations. British English often uses single quotation marks to identify the outermost text of a primary quotation versus double quotation marks for inner, nested quotations. When dealing with direct speech, according to the British style guide Butcher’s Copy-editing, if a quotation is broken by words of the main sentence, and then resumed, the punctuation before the break should follow the closing quote unless it forms part of the quotation. Whether these are single or double depends on the context; however, many styles, especially for poetry, prefer the use of single quotation marks. While American style has periods and commas going inside single and double quotation marks, question marks follow logic.
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.

• However, most computer text-editing programs provide a “smart quotes” feature to automatically convert straight quotation marks into bidirectional punctuation, though sometimes imperfectly (see § Smart quotes).
• A closing quotation mark, », is added to the beginning of each new paragraph within a quotation.
• Commas and periods that are part of the overall sentence go inside the quotation marks, even though they aren’t part of the original quotation.
• They were used to quote direct speech as early as the late sixteenth century, and this practice became more common over time.
• Longer quotations should be set off from the main text, and are referred to as block quotations.
• The following is an example of TeX input which yields proper curly 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.

Order of punctuation

The closing or right single quotation mark is identical in form to the apostrophe and similar to the prime symbol. Different varieties and styles of English have different conventions regarding whether terminal punctuation should be written inside or outside the quotation marks. A tendency to use single quotation marks in British writing is thought to have arisen after the mid-19th century invention spinorhino casino of steam-powered presses and the consequent rise of London and New York as distinct, industrialized publishing centers whose publishing houses adhered to separate norms. If quotation marks are used inside another pair of quotation marks, then single quotation marks are used.
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

If the question mark or exclamation mark is not part of the quote but part of a question or statement, place it outside the quotation marks. If the question mark or exclamation mark is part of the quote, place it inside the quotation marks. Place the period inside the quotation marks when a quotation comes at the end of a sentence. Place both parts of the quote within their own set of quotation marks. Because you want to attach the speaker to their dialogue, use a comma rather than a period to end the quote inside the quotation marks. In British English, punctuation marks are placed outside the quotation marks unless they are part of the original quotation.
Scare quotes generally appear as quotation marks around a single word or sometimes a phrase. Spanish uses angled quotation marks (comillas latinas or angulares), with no space between the quotation mark and the quoted material. In case of quoted material inside a quotation, rules and most noted style manuals prescribe the use of different kinds of quotation marks. North American printing usually puts full stops and commas (but not colons, semicolons, exclamation or question marks) inside the closing quotation mark, whether it is part of the original quoted material or not. Nevertheless, while other languages do not insert spaces between the quotation marks and the word(s) quoted, the French usage does insert them, even if they are narrow spaces.

In Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, the curved quotation marks, „…“, are used as a secondary level or in handwriting, while the angular marks, «…», are used as the primary level on printed text.citation needed The curved quotation marks (“66–99”) usage, “…”, was exported to some non-Latin scripts, notably where there was some English influence, for instance in Native American scripts and Indic scripts. After the publication of Filelfo’s edition, the quotation marks for literal quotations prevailed. The single quotation mark is traced to Ancient Greek practice, adopted and adapted by monastic copyists. The method for producing smart quotes may be based solely on the character preceding the mark. To make typographic quotation marks easier to enter, publishing software often automatically converts typewriter quotation marks (and apostrophes) to typographic form during text entry (with or without the user being aware of it).
If a quoted question ends in midsentence, the question mark replaces a comma. The placement of question marks with quotation marks follows logic. To add quotation mark to a word list please sign up or log in.

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The American style is used by most newspapers, publishing houses, and style guides in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada as well. Some American style guides specific to certain specialties also prefer the British style. Hart’s Rules and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors call the British style “new” quoting. Both systems have the same rules regarding question marks, exclamation points, colons, and semicolons.
The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same glyph. Quotation marksA are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. In the TeX typesetting program, left double quotes are produced by typing two back-ticks (“) and right double quotes by typing two apostrophes (”).
In Finnish and Swedish, right quotes, called citation marks, ”…”, are used to mark both the beginning and the end of a quote. In Central Europe, the practice was to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity aimed inward. In Western Europe the custom became to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity of each mark aimed outward. (For additional characters used in other languages, see Quotation mark § Summary table.) Prime and double prime are not present in most code pages, including ASCII and Latin-1, but are present in Unicode, as characters U+2032 ′ PRIME and U+2033 ″ DOUBLE PRIME.