Em dash and quotation marks to copy and paste: curly quotes, guillemets and apostrophes

Quotation marks copy and paste, free and with no sign-up

This page gathers the quotation marks, primes, apostrophes, dashes and typographic symbols that are missing from your keyboard or hard to find. Click any symbol and it goes straight to your clipboard, then paste it wherever you need it with Ctrl + V (Command + V on a Mac). If you need several, they add up in “Your selection” so you can copy them all at once. To find a mark quickly, type its name in the search box (prime, dash or guillemet, for example) or use the group filters.

Each time you copy, the tool shows the character’s name, its Unicode code point, the HTML entity, its CSS and JavaScript escapes, the URL encoding and, when there is one, the Windows Alt code. It works for writing a well-punctuated text and for laying out a website, a PDF or a slide deck without straight quotes where curly ones should be. If the text is already written, the quote converter at the end of the tool fixes all its straight quotes at once.

It was built by DigiAcción, a digital marketing agency in Andorra based in La Massana. We work on web design, SEO, GEO (visibility in AI search), Google Ads, Meta Ads, video, graphic design and online stores. The tool is free, needs no sign-up, has nothing to install and runs in your browser, on your phone too.

Types of quotation marks and how to use them

English uses two kinds of quotation marks, double and single, and other languages add their own shapes. Each one has a typographic version, curved or angled, and a straight version inherited from the typewriter.

Double quotation marks “ ”

In American English, double quotation marks enclose direct speech, quotations and the titles of short works such as articles, songs, poems or chapters. They also flag a word used in an unusual or ironic sense. The opening mark curves like a small 6 and the closing mark like a 9, which is why they are sometimes called 66 and 99 quotes.

Single quotation marks ‘ ’

American style puts single quotation marks inside double ones for a quote within a quote. British publishers often reverse the order and call them inverted commas. The closing single quote is the same character as the typographic apostrophe, U+2019.

Guillemets « » and other languages

French, Spanish, Italian and many other languages use guillemets, the angle quotation marks « ». French typesetting adds a thin space inside them, German usually opens low and closes high („Hallo“), and Spanish uses « » first, “ ” inside and ‘ ’ inside those. Japanese uses corner brackets, 「 」 and 『 』; if you write in Japanese, our Japanese letters tool has the full hiragana and katakana sets and a romaji converter.

Smart quotes in Word, Google Docs and WordPress

Smart quotes are the curly quotation marks that editors insert automatically when you type a straight quote. Word does it as you type, Google Docs has a Use smart quotes setting under Tools, Preferences, and WordPress converts straight quotes into curly ones when it displays a post.

That is usually what you want in a document, but it can cause trouble when text moves between programs: a command, a line of code or a measurement can end up with the wrong mark. This tool copies each character by its exact code point, so what you paste is exactly what you clicked. For code, spreadsheet formulas and HTML attributes, stick to straight quotes.

Convert straight quotes to curly quotes

To fix a whole text at once, paste it into the quote converter at the end of the tool. Choose curly quotes, guillemets or straight quotes and the result appears as you type, ready to copy in one click. The converter works out from context which marks open and which close, alternates double and single quotes when one quote sits inside another, and turns straight apostrophes between letters, as in don't or it's, into curly ones. It also accepts text that already has curly quotes, so you can switch styles or strip everything back to straight quotes for code.

Few quotation mark pages do this: the copy-and-paste ones we reviewed only copy one mark at a time. Straight quotes right after a number, as in 5' 11", become primes (5′ 11″), which is the correct mark for measurements.

Smart quotes in Word: turn them on or off

In Word for Windows, the setting is under File, Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options, AutoFormat As You Type: tick or untick “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes”. Right after Word curls a quote, Ctrl + Z gives you the straight one back. If a document mixes both styles, there is a quick fix: with smart quotes turned on, use Find and Replace to replace a straight double quote with the same straight double quote. Word swaps each one for the correct opening or closing curly mark. Do the same with the single quote to fix apostrophes, and then check any apostrophe at the start of a word.

Prime symbol ′ and double prime ″

The prime (U+2032) and the double prime (U+2033) look like an apostrophe and a quotation mark, but they are separate characters. They are short, slanted strokes without the comma shape of curly quotes, and they belong to measurements and math.

Feet and inches symbol

In US customary units, the prime marks feet and the double prime marks inches: someone who is 5′ 11″ is five feet eleven inches tall, and a 55″ TV has a 55-inch diagonal. Typing the straight keyboard quotes (5' 11") is the usual shortcut and readers understand it, but curly quotes are always wrong here. The symbol goes right after the number, with no space in between. To measure something on your screen, try our online ruler in inches.

Degrees, minutes and seconds

In angles and map coordinates, the prime marks minutes of arc and the double prime seconds of arc: 40° 25′ 08″ N. The International System of Units keeps these symbols for angles, while minutes and seconds of time are written min and s. In math, the prime also names derivatives and related points, as in f′(x).

Apostrophe symbol: curly, straight and the ʻokina

The typographic apostrophe is ’ (U+2019), the same character as the closing single quote. The straight one on your keyboard, ' (U+0027), is the typewriter version: correct in code and acceptable in plain text, but less polished in print. A classic slip in edited text is the apostrophe at the start of a word, as in ’90s, which smart quotes often turn into an opening quote by mistake.

The ʻokina in Hawaiian

Some languages treat the apostrophe shape as a letter. The ʻokina (U+02BB), which looks like a turned comma, marks a glottal stop in Hawaiian, as in Hawaiʻi. Unicode also has a modifier letter apostrophe, ʼ (U+02BC), used in several orthographies. Both are in the apostrophe group, so you can copy the exact character instead of an approximation.

Hyphen vs en dash vs em dash

All three are horizontal lines, but they have different lengths and jobs. The hyphen (-) is the shortest: it joins compound words such as well-known and splits a word at the end of a line.

The en dash (U+2013), about the width of a capital N, marks ranges and connections in English, as in pages 10 to 20 or a Boston to New York flight written with a dash. The em dash (U+2014), as wide as a capital M, sets off an aside or a sudden break in a sentence, much like parentheses or a colon but with more emphasis. Use a pair of em dashes around an aside in the middle of a sentence, or a single one before a final twist or explanation.

Neither dash is on a standard keyboard, which is why so many people look for an em dash to copy and paste. Both are in the punctuation group of the tool, next to the figure dash, the horizontal bar and the non-breaking hyphen, which keeps two words together on the same line.

Minus sign − vs hyphen

For math, Unicode has yet another character, the minus sign (U+2212, − in HTML). The hyphen on your keyboard, officially the hyphen-minus (U+002D), does double duty in plain text and code, but in typeset math, tables and charts the real minus sign usually looks better: it is typically longer than a hyphen and as wide as the plus sign, so 8 − 3 = 5 lines up neatly. Spreadsheets and programming languages generally expect the hyphen-minus, so keep that one in formulas and code.

Two-em dash and three-em dash

The punctuation group also has two longer dashes. In Chicago style, the three-em dash (U+2E3B) has traditionally replaced an author’s name in successive bibliography entries by the same author, although the latest edition of the manual recommends repeating the name. The two-em dash (U+2E3A) marks missing or illegible text in a quotation, or a name that has been withheld. Copy them as single characters instead of stringing em dashes together.

How to use quotation marks: quotes, titles and scare quotes

Quotation marks have a handful of jobs, and knowing them avoids most mistakes. The main one is to reproduce someone’s exact words; if you paraphrase, you don’t need them. They also enclose the titles of short works, such as an article, a poem, a song or a TV episode, while the titles of long works, such as books, films and albums, go in italics.

Writers also use them as scare quotes, to show that a word is used ironically or that they don’t fully accept it: the “improvements” made things worse. Use them sparingly, because a text full of scare quotes reads as sarcastic. Finally, quotation marks are not a way to add emphasis: a sign that offers “fresh” bread suggests the opposite of what the baker meant. For emphasis, use italics or bold instead.

Inverted question mark and other punctuation marks

Spanish opens questions and exclamations with their own marks, ¿ and ¡, written at the start of the sentence: ¿Dónde estás? English keyboards don’t show them, so they are among the most copied symbols on this page. In English they are usually called the inverted or upside-down question mark and exclamation point. When a sentence is both a question and an exclamation, Spanish can combine them: ¡¿Qué?!

The ellipsis … is a single character (U+2026) that keeps its three dots together at the end of a line. The interrobang ‽, a blend of question mark and exclamation point, was created in 1962 by the American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter. You will also find the double exclamation mark ‼ and the reversed question mark ⸮, which has been proposed as an irony mark.

Typographic symbols: section sign, pilcrow, dagger and degree

Typography has its own set of signs for organizing a text and pointing readers around it. Many come from hand-set printing and are still common in legal, academic and design work.

Section sign § and pilcrow ¶

The section sign § refers to a numbered section of a document, especially in laws and regulations: § 3. The pilcrow ¶ once marked the start of a new paragraph; today most people know it from the Word button that shows formatting marks. The dagger † and double dagger ‡ mark footnotes after the asterisk, and the dagger can also indicate a year of death. Bullets such as •, ‣ and ◦ are handy for lists in plain text, like an email or a social media bio, where list formatting is not available.

Degree symbol °, copyright © and trademark ™

The degree symbol ° is a small raised circle for temperatures and angles (68°F). It is not the masculine ordinal indicator º used in Spanish and other languages, which is a small raised o, often underlined. The two look alike, but search engines and screen readers treat them as different characters. The same group has © for copyright, ® for registered trademarks, ™ for trademarks and ℠ for service marks, plus the per mille sign ‰.

Ditto mark 〃

The ditto mark 〃 (U+3003) means “same as above” in lists, tables and inventories, so you don’t have to repeat a word or a figure on every line. By hand, people usually draw it as a pair of quotation marks, but the dedicated character can’t be mistaken for a closing quote. It comes from the Unicode block for Chinese, Japanese and Korean punctuation, so in some fonts it looks wider than the surrounding text.

Quotation marks in HTML: entities and Unicode

On a web page you can type these characters directly if the page is saved as UTF-8, or use HTML character references. The named ones are easy to remember: “ and ” for “ ”, ‘ and ’ for ‘ ’, « and » for « », and ′ and ″ for primes. Any character also works with its number, such as — for the em dash.

Each symbol in the tool shows its entity and its CSS escape, which is handy for the content property in a stylesheet. CSS also has a quotes property that sets which marks the browser draws around the q element, so a page in French or Spanish can show guillemets automatically. The MDN glossary entry on character references explains how they work, and the Unicode General Punctuation chart lists the official name of every quote, dash and prime.

One detail that matters for SEO: in page titles, meta descriptions and image alt text, curly quotes and guillemets display without problems, while an unescaped straight double quote can cut an HTML attribute short and leave the text unfinished.

Em dash HTML code, JavaScript and URL encoding

The em dash is one of the characters people look up most in code. In HTML it is — or —, in CSS \2014, in a JavaScript string \u2014 and in a URL %E2%80%94, its UTF-8 bytes. The tool shows these codes for any symbol you copy: the en dash, for example, is –, \u2013 and %E2%80%93.