In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas (informally referred to as quotes or speech marks) are punctuation marks surrounding a quotation, direct speech, or a literal title or name. Quotation marks can also be used to indicate a different meaning of a word or phrase than the one typically associated with it and are often used to express irony. Quotation marks are sometimes used to provide emphasis, although this is usually considered incorrect.
Quotation marks are written as a pair of opening and closing marks in either of two styles: single (‘…’) or double (“…”). Opening and closing quotation marks may be identical in form (called neutral, vertical, straight, typewriter or "dumb" quotation marks), or may be distinctly left-handed and right-handed (typographic or, colloquially, curly quotation marks); see quotation mark glyphs for details. Typographic quotation marks are usually used in manuscript and typeset text. Because typewriter and computer keyboards lack keys to directly enter typographic quotation marks, much typed writing has neutral quotation marks. The “smart quotes” feature in some computer software can convert neutral quotation marks to typographic ones, but sometimes imperfectly.
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