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Guillemets are punctuation marks used as quotation marks in many languages. They can be single or double and have additional functions in computer languages. They are named after a French printer and are used differently in various languages. They are also known as angle quotation marks or duck foot quotes and have become universal symbols in electronic devices.
The guillemet is a punctuation mark in the category of paired brackets that have the function of enclosing a set of words. It looks like two line segments hinged into a directional arrow. They can be single or double marks, and many languages use this punctuation as quotation marks. This is how they appear: « and ». With the advent of computer languages and digital printing, symbols have also acquired additional functions.
Guillemet is a French word, believed to be named after the printer who first engraved and printed the “French quote.” In English, these are called angle quotation marks, but this is a punctuation that is rarely encountered. Unusually, they may also be referred to as “duck foot quotes” due to their resemblance to the animal’s mud footprints. Sometimes, they are mistakenly called guillemot, which is a type of seabird.
French isn’t the only language that uses guillemets as quotation marks. Spanish, Russian, and Swiss-German are just a few of the many languages that use them for the same purpose: to indicate and separate speech. However, different languages can use them in different ways. French begins a quotation with a left-pointing guillemet and ends it with one pointing to the right, similar to the curly quotation marks in parentheses used in English type. Danish reverses the direction of the arrows inward, and Finnish uses double punctuation of the right arrow exclusively.
The single-marked guillemet looks like this: ‹ and ›. These are used in some languages as nested secondary quotes, in the same way as English single quotes. Special characters are not found on a typical English keyboard. For their approximations, the inequality symbols for less than (), also called breaks, are used and typed twice when necessary.
The glyphs have also been referred to as diamond brackets and chevrons, the latter a reference to the triangular stripes of military rank insignia and heraldic shields. Digitally, the characters are defined as left- and right-angled quotation marks. They have their own standardized alphanumeric designations. Taking advantage of the relative rarity of symbols in plain text, several computer programs use guillemets as delimiters to mark the beginning and end of logical operations. Even casual computer users have commonly adopted these brackets in text-based communication to describe a sender’s state or action, for example to express “smiling.”
Double guillemets have become universal symbols in electronic devices for fast forwarding and rewinding recorded media. Increasingly, right-angled quotation marks have gained use in the English press as an alternative to ellipsis (…) or as a mark to indicate the continuation of text content elsewhere. Conversely, in other languages, guillemet as quotation marks are increasingly used interchangeably with the English punctuation marks “ and ”.
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