U2018

U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, commonly known as the left single quotation mark, is a punctuation character in the Unicode standard. It functions as the opening single quotation mark, used to begin a quoted segment. It is normally paired with U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK to enclose quoted text. The marks are part of typographic quotation marks and are used in many languages that employ single quotation marks.

Encoding and representations: In Unicode the character is U+2018. In UTF-8 it is encoded as E2 80 98; in UTF-16 as 0x2018. In HTML it can be written as ‘ or as a numeric character reference ‘.

Usage notes: U+2018 is predominantly a typographic opening quote. In nested quotations or certain style guides, English writing may switch to the double quotation marks U+201C/U+201D for inner quotes, or to U+2018/U+2019 for single quotes at other levels. The character is widely supported across fonts and software but in plain ASCII contexts the apostrophe U+0027 is often used as a substitute.

Related characters: U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, U+201A SINGLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK, U+201C/U+201D DOUBLE QUOTATION MARKS, U+0027 APOSTROPHE.

See also: Unicode, punctuation, typographic quotation marks.