Quotation Marks
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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.
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.
Quotation Marks
paired punctuation marks used in atext to set off direct speech, citations, and titles, as well as wordsand expressions used in an ironic sense or in an unusual meaning.Quotation marks are represented graphically in two forms:guillemets, or French quotation marks (« »), and double com-mas, or German quotation marks („ “). In addition to theseforms, single quotation marks (‘ ’) are sometimes used to denotethe translation of a foreign word—for example, German Tisch, ’table.’
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.