The straight " and ' every keyboard types, and the curly, guillemet, and low-quote variants that stand in for them in different software and languages. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
The quotation mark (", Unicode U+0022) and apostrophe (', U+0027) are the plain, straight characters on every keyboard. They're also the ones code and markup expect — the curly “smart quotes” your word processor substitutes automatically are a different, incompatible character underneath, which is the single most common reason pasted text breaks in code editors.
The plain ASCII quote characters — what a keyboard actually types, and what code expects.
The typeset-style quotes with distinct opening and closing shapes — what "autocorrect" turns straight quotes into.
The quotation styles standard in French, German, and other European typography.
The straight " and ' marks are typewriter-era characters: mechanical typewriters had no room for separate opening and closing keys, so one straight glyph did both jobs. That constraint carried straight into ASCII and then into every programming language and markup format built on top of it — which is why " still delimits strings in JSON, HTML attributes, and nearly every language in use today.
Traditional typesetting, by contrast, always used distinct opening and closing shapes — “ ” and ‘ ’ — going back centuries in printed books. When word processors arrived, they added "smart quotes" autocorrect to restore that typeset look automatically, silently swapping the straight ASCII characters for the curly Unicode ones as you type. Guillemets (« », from French printer Guillaume Le Bé, 16th century) and low quotes („ ‚) are regional variants of the same idea — different shapes, same job, standard in French and German typography respectively rather than errors or substitutes for the English pair.
| Character | Windows (Alt code) | HTML entity |
|---|---|---|
| " Straight double quote | Alt+0034 | " |
| ' Straight single quote | Alt+0039 | ' |
| “ ” Curly double quotes | Alt+0147 / Alt+0148 | “ / ” |
| ‘ ’ Curly single quotes | Alt+0145 / Alt+0146 | ‘ / ’ |
| « » Guillemets | Alt+0171 / Alt+0187 | « / » |
Mac: Option+[ and Option+Shift+[ produce “ and ” directly; the plain " and ' keys always type the straight ASCII versions.
Word processors auto-convert straight quotes (" and ') into curly "smart quotes" (“ ” ‘ ’) as you type. Programming languages and markup formats expect the straight versions to delimit strings, so a pasted curly quote is a different character the parser doesn't recognize — the fix is retyping the quote or disabling autocorrect before copying.
" (U+0022) is the plain, direction-less ASCII quotation mark every keyboard types. “ and ” (U+201C/U+201D) are the curly "smart quote" pair with distinct opening and closing shapes, used in typeset prose. They look similar but are different Unicode characters — only " is guaranteed to work in code, filenames, and form fields.
Most word processors and phone keyboards insert them automatically via autocorrect. To type them directly: Windows Alt+0147/0148 for “ ” and Alt+0145/0146 for ‘ ’; Mac Option+[ and Option+Shift+[ for “ and ”. Otherwise, copy them from this page.
« » are the standard quotation marks in French, and in many other European languages, in place of the English “ ” pair. German and some Eastern European languages use „ ‚ (low quotes) for opening instead. All are genuine quotation marks — just region-specific typographic conventions, not errors.
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