Quotation marks, also known as quotes marks, speech marks, inverted commas, or talking marks, are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to distinguish direct speech, quotes, or phrases. Pairs consist of opening and closing quotation marks, which may or may not be the same character.

Double quotation mark are older than single. This derives from the marginal notation used in annotations in 15th-century manuscripts to indicate particularly important parts (not necessarily quotation). The notation was placed in the outer margins of the page and repeated along each line of the passage. By the mid-16th century, printers (especially Basel, Switzerland) had developed a typographic form of this notation, similar to modern double-quotes pointing to the right.

In the 17th century, this process became peculiar to quoted material, especially in the UK, where it was common to print quotation marks at the beginning and end of citations and at the margins. The use of French (see “Specific Language Features” below) is a remnant of this. In most other languages, including English, marginal marks have been eliminated in the last few years of the 18th century. The use of open and close mark pairs at lowercase levels has been generalized.

By the 19th century, design and usage began to be unique to each region. In Western Europe, customs have used pairs of quotes. In the UK, these marks have risen to the same height as the top of the capital letter (“…”).

Apostrophes and angular quotation marks that are clearly distinguishable.

Blank space (in yellow) provoked by elevated quotation marks. Some type designers consider this excessive.

In France, by the end of the 19th century, it had been changed to a square shape and spaced apart («…»). Some authors argue that this reason is pragmatic in order to obtain characters that are clearly distinguishable from apostrophes, commas, and parentheses. Also, in other scripts, angular quotation can be distinguished from other punctuation characters (Greek breathing symbols, Armenian emphasis and apostrophes, Arabic commas, decimal points, thousands of separators, and so on).

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