laquo

laquo is the left-pointing double angle quotation mark. It is used as the opening quotation mark in several languages that employ guillemets, with the corresponding right-pointing mark raquo » serving as the closing quotation mark. Together, they form a pair of typographic quotation marks commonly referred to as guillemets.

Origin and naming are tied to French typographic tradition. The general term guillemet comes from French printing, while laquo and raquo are the names used in computing and encoding to distinguish the opening and closing marks. In Unicode and HTML, these characters are encoded and accessible as distinct symbols.

Encoding and representation: in Unicode, the left and right double angle quotation marks are U+00AB and U+00BB, respectively. In HTML and XML, they can be represented by the named character references « and ».

Usage and typography: guillemets are standard quotation marks in languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian. French typography traditionally places a non-breaking space before the opening guillemet and after the closing one. Other languages may use guillemets variably, depending on regional conventions, publishing house style, or the level of nesting of quotations. In multilingual texts, guillemets are often used to differentiate quoted material from surrounding prose, with nesting sometimes alternating between guillemets and other quotation marks.

See also guillemet; quotation marks; punctuation.