Guillemets

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General typography
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Uncommon typography
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Guillemets, also called angle quotes, are line segments, pointed as if arrows (« or »), forming a complementary set of punctuation marks used as a form of quotation mark. The symbol at either end — « or » — is a guillemet (pronounced [ˈgij:me]).

Guillemets are often produced with double inequality characters (<< or >>) or double chevrons (〈〈 or 〉〉) particularly on computers with operating systems or computer keyboards that do not have support for the actual characters.

In Unicode, the « character is called "left-pointing double angle quotation mark", and exists at code point U+00AB (HTML entity «), whilst the » character is named "right-pointing double angle quotation mark", and is located at code point U+00BB (HTML entity »). The characters are mirrored when used in right-to-left contexts, which makes them not really "left-pointing" and "right-pointing", but opening and closing.

1 Uses
- 1.1 Speech Marks
- 1.2 UML
2 Derivation
3 References
4 See also

Uses

Speech Marks

Used pointing outwards («like this») to indicate speech in these languages:

Albanian
Arabic
Belarusian
Catalan
Estonian
Franco-Provençal
French (separated by spaces « like this »)
German (only in Switzerland)
Greek
Hebrew
Italian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
European Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Spanish
Swiss languages
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese

Used pointing inwards (»like this«) to indicate speech in these languages:

Croatian
Czech
Danish
German (outside of Switzerland)
Hungarian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovene

Used pointing right (»like this») to indicate speech in these languages:

Finnish
Swedish

(Source: Quotation mark)

UML

Used in Unified Modeling Language to indicate a stereotype of a standard element.

Derivation

The word derives as a diminutive of the French name Guillaume (whose equivalent in English is William), implying someone of that name originated or popularised its use^{[citation
needed]}. Some languages have made use of this: the Irish term is Liamóg, from Liam 'William' and a diminutive suffix.

In Adobe Systems font software, their file format specifications, and in all fonts derived from these that contain the characters, the word is incorrectly spelled guillemot, which is a species of auk, in the names of the two glyphs "guillemotleft" and "guillemotright". Adobe notes the error but points out that the incorrect names are the ones actually used in existing fonts and software^[1]; presumably, it is too late to change it, as it would break existing software.

References

^ Adobe Systems Inc., PostScript Language Reference 3rd edition, Addison Wesley 1999. ISBN 0-201-37922-8. Character set endnote 3, page 783.