quotation marks

Quotation marks are most commonly used to indicate the exact words that someone else said. This is known as direct speech or direct quotation.

There are two forms of quotation marks: double quotation marks ( “ ” ) and single quotation marks ( ‘ ’ ). American English almost exclusively uses double quotation marks, while British English tends to favor single quotation marks.

quotation mark

Either of a pair of punctuation marks used primarily to mark the beginning and end of a passage attributed to another and repeated word for word, but also to indicate meanings or glosses and to indicate the unusual or dubious status of a word. They appear in the form of double quotation marks (" ") and single quotation marks (' '). Single quotation marks are usually reserved for setting off a quotation within another quotation.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

quotation mark

(Printing, Lithography & Bookbinding) either of the punctuation marks used to begin or end a quotation, respectively “ and ” or ‘ and ’ in English printing and writing. When double marks are used, single marks indicate a quotation within a quotation, and vice versa. Also called: inverted comma

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

quota′tion mark`

one of the marks used to indicate the beginning and end of a quotation, in English usu. shown as (“) at the beginning and (”) at the end, or, for a quotation within a quotation, as single marks of this kind, as “He said, 'I will go.'”

[1880–85]

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

quotation mark - a punctuation mark used to attribute the enclosed text to someone else

inverted comma, quote

punctuation mark, punctuation - the marks used to clarify meaning by indicating separation of words into sentences and clauses and phrases

single quote - a single quotation mark

double quotes - a pair of quotation marks

scare quote - the use of quotation marks to indicate that it is not the authors preferred terminology

Translations

GänsefußGänsefüßchen

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

You can always tell what is from the original by the quotation marks, if by nothing else.

View in context

"What about quotation marks?" said the priest, and flung his cigar far into the darkness like a shooting star.

Then I saw that the quotation marks wouldn't do, so I snipped them off, and to make it seem likelier, snipped the whole quire to match.

View in context

Three days, at white heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he picked up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs and quotation marks. He had never thought of such things before; and he promptly set to work writing the article over, referring continually to the pages of the rhetoric and learning more in a day about composition than the average schoolboy in a year.

View in context

"It's what I used to call--and still call in quotation marks `kindred spirits.'"

View in context

The first is that 'that' and quotation marks contribute not the semantic values of parts, but rather certain linguistic objects.

Quotation: compositionality and innocence without demonstration

Although books in Japanese treating Natsume S[angle quotation mark, right]seki (1867-1916), the man many consider the finest modern Japanese novelist, number in the hundreds, it is only with the appearance of the work under review that a full-length study devoted to this complex man and his broad, variegated oeuvre is available in English.

Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume S[angle quotation mark, right]seki

Who among us hasn't noticed the current epidemic of missing commas, the improperly used quotation marks, and the random application of dashes anywhere and everywhere in text?

An eye for detail

Y[angle quotation mark, right]ko, the protagonist, has not had an easy life, nor is there much hope that her situation will improve.

The Shade of Blossoms. Ann Arbor, Mi. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan (University of Michigan Press, distr.). 1998. xiii + 123 pages. $28.95 ($12.95 paper). ISBN 0-939512-87-4 (88-2 paper)

In American English, the comma or period comes before the quotation mark. In England, the quotation mark comes first.

Would you ask, "Where do I put the question mark?"

* use quotation marks correctly, for example, for certain titles and direct speech.

Chapter 30: Punctuation I--end marks, capitalization, apostrophes, abbreviations, numerals, italics, underlining, and quotation marks