Punctuation & Quotes - Alt Codes & Unicode

This table covers the punctuation that separates typeset text from typewriter text. Curly quotation marks, the en and em dashes, the true ellipsis, the Spanish inverted marks and the guillemets used across much of Europe all have straight-ASCII substitutes that most people use by default — and the substitutes are what make text look unfinished.

Quotation marks are the most visible. The straight marks " and ' on your keyboard are typewriter compromises, inherited from machines that could not afford separate opening and closing glyphs. Typeset English uses paired curly quotes: "like this" and 'like this'. The apostrophe in contractions is the same character as the closing single quote, which is why it curls to the right — it's and don't, never it's with a straight mark in set text. Most writing software substitutes these automatically, which is usually helpful and occasionally wrong: in code, straight quotes are required, and smart-quote substitution inside a code block is a classic source of syntax errors.

Quotation conventions vary widely by language and the marks in this table reflect that. French uses guillemets with spaces inside: « comme ça ». German uses low-high pairs, „so" . Russian uses guillemets without the inner spaces. Switching language should mean switching quote style, and a translation that keeps English quotes is a sign of an incomplete localisation.

The dashes are three different characters with three jobs. The hyphen - joins compounds and breaks words at line ends. The en dash – spans ranges, as in 1939–1945 and pages 12–18, and joins paired items. The em dash — sets off a parenthetical break in a sentence. American style typically closes the em dash up against the surrounding words; British style often uses a spaced en dash instead for the same purpose. Two hyphens are not an em dash, though many editors convert them automatically.

The ellipsis … is a single character rather than three periods, and the difference matters for line breaking: three separate periods can be split across a line break, while the ellipsis character cannot. The inverted Spanish marks ¡ and ¿ open exclamations and questions and are required in written Spanish, not optional flourishes. On Windows, hold Alt with Num Lock on: " is Alt+0147, " is Alt+0148, ' is Alt+0145, ' is Alt+0146, – is Alt+0150, — is Alt+0151, … is Alt+0133, « is Alt+0171, » is Alt+0187, ¡ is Alt+0161 and ¿ is Alt+0191. On macOS, Option+[ and Shift+Option+[ give the double quotes, Option+] and Shift+Option+] the single ones, Option+hyphen the en dash, Shift+Option+hyphen the em dash and Option+semicolon the ellipsis.