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Guillemets, also called angle quotes, are line segments, pointed as if arrows (« or »), sometimes forming a complementary set of punctuation marks used as a form of quotation mark. The symbol at either end — « or » — is a guillemet (pronounced^[help] [gijmɛ] in French). They are used in a number of languages to indicate speech.

« » v • d • e Punctuation
apostrophe ( ’ ' ) brackets (( )), ([ ]), ({ }), (< >) colon ( : ) comma ( , ) dashes ( ‒, –, —, ― ) ellipsis ( …, ... ) exclamation mark ( ! ) full stop/period ( . ) guillemets ( « » ) hyphen ( -, ‐ ) question mark ( ? ) quotation marks ( ‘ ’, “ ” ) semicolon ( ; ) slash/stroke ( / ) solidus ( ⁄ )
Interword separation
spaces ( ) ( ) ( ) interpunct ( · )
General typography
ampersand ( & ) asterisk ( * ) at ( @ ) backslash ( \ ) bullet ( • ) caret ( ^ ) currency ( ¤ ) ¢, $, €, £, ¥, ₩, ₪ dagger/obelisk ( † ) ( ‡ ) degree ( ° ) inverted exclamation point ( ¡ ) inverted question mark ( ¿ ) number sign ( # ) numero sign ( № ) percent and related signs ( %, ‰, ‱ ) pilcrow ( ¶ ) prime ( ′ ) section sign ( § ) tilde/swung dash ( ~ ) umlaut/diaeresis ( ¨ ) underscore/understrike ( _ ) vertical/pipe/broken bar ( |, ¦ )
Uncommon typography
asterism ( ⁂ ) index/fist ( ☞ ) therefore sign ( ∴ ) lozenge ( ◊ ) interrobang ( ‽ ) irony mark ( ؟ ) reference mark ( ※ ) sarcasm mark

Contents 1 Uses 1.1 Speech Marks 1.2 Direction 1.3 Other uses 2 Etymology 3 Guillemets in computing 3.1 Typing "«" and "»" on computers 3.2 Terminology 3.3 UML 3.4 Adobe Systems 4 See also 5 References

Main article: Quotation mark, non-English usage

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

• Albanian
• Arabic
• Armenian
• Belarusian
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Estonian
• Franco-Provençal
• French (separated by spaces « like this »)
• Galician
• German (only in Switzerland)
• Greek
• Italian
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian
• Persian
• Polish usually to indicate a quote inside a quote (nowadays, though incorrectly, more often used pointing inwards)
• Portuguese (European)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish (although their use is uncommon outside Spain)
• Swiss languages
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese
• North Korean, however in South Korea "" is used.

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

• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• German (except in Switzerland.)
• Hungarian
• Serbian
• Slovak
• Slovene

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

• Finnish
• Swedish

A guillemet is sometimes used to indicate direction, for example:

• fast forward button on a media player, or fast rewind indicated by the complementary guillemet
• a chevron on road signage to show road direction, or multiple chevrons pointing in the same direction for emphasis
• as an alternative to an ellipsis in a document, for example to indicate additional content. The guillemet is balanced in the spine height of the line for most fonts, so it is more visible than an ellipsis.

Guillemets are used in Chinese to indicate the title of a book. For instance, «哈利波特与火焰杯» is Chinese for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

The word is a diminutive of the French name Guillaume (whose equivalent in English is William), after the French printer and punchcutter Guillaume le Bé (1525–1598).^[1][2] Some languages derive their word for guillemets analogously; for example, the Irish term is Liamóg, from Liam 'William' and a diminutive suffix.

For Windows users, type "«" by holding Alt + 0171 and "»" by holding Alt + 0187.

For Macintosh users, type "«" as Option-Backslash and "»" as Option-Shift-Backslash. (This applies to all English-language keyboard layouts supplied with the operating system, e.g. "Australian", "British", "Canadian", "U.S." and "U.S. Extended". Other language layouts may differ.)

For GNU/Linux users, it would depend on a number of factors including the [Keyboard layout] that is in effect, whether you were using X Window. For example with US International Keyboard layout selected you would type Alt Gr + [ for "«" and Alt Gr + "]" for "»". On some configurations you type "«" as Alt Gr + z and "»" as Alt Gr + x.

Guillemets are often produced with double inequality characters (<< or >>) or double chevrons (〈〈 or 〉〉) particularly on computers with operating systems or 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 »). Despite their names, the characters are mirrored when used in right-to-left contexts.

Guillemets are used in Unified Modeling Language to indicate a stereotype of a standard element.

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" (a malapropism: guillemots are actually a type of bird) in the names of the two glyphs "guillemotleft" and "guillemotright". Adobe acknowledges the error but says that the incorrect names are the ones actually used in existing fonts and software;^[3] presumably, it is too late to change it, as it would break existing software.

• Bracket
• Chevron
• Keyboard (computing)
• Quotation mark

1. ^ http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/punc.htm
2. ^ http://www.decodeunicode.org/en/u+00ab
3. ^ Adobe Systems Inc., PostScript Language Reference 3rd edition, Addison Wesley 1999. ISBN 0-201-37922-8. Character set endnote 3, page 783.