U201CU201D

U+201C and U+201D are the Unicode code points for the left double quotation mark and the right double quotation mark, respectively. They are part of the General Punctuation block and are used to denote opening and closing quotation marks in many languages and typographic traditions.

These characters are used in digital and print typography to distinguish the start and end of quoted text, providing clearer readability than the plain ASCII quotation mark. While they are common in English and other languages that adopt typographic quotation marks, exact usage rules can vary by locale and publishing style. In many contexts, straight quotation marks (U+0022) are still used, particularly in plain text or systems lacking typographic fonts.

Encoding and representations: In Unicode, U+201C and U+201D are encoded as UTF-8 sequences E2 80 9C and E2 80 9D, respectively. In HTML, they can be represented by named entities “ and ”, or by numeric references “ and ” (or decimal “ and ”).

Usage considerations: The introduction of opening and closing quotation marks supports proper typesetting and localization, with many languages employing quotation marks that pair in the same way as these characters. Other languages may use different marks, such as angle quotation marks or language-specific conventions, but U+201C and U+201D remain widely supported across modern fonts and software.

See also: Unicode General Punctuation, quotation marks, typographic punctuation.