---
name: Smart quotes
slug: smart-quotes
category: typography
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: The curved opening and closing quotation marks a typeface actually
  draws, as opposed to the straight vertical marks inherited from typewriters.
aliases:
  - name: curly quotes
  - name: typographer's quotes
  - name: dumb quotes
  - name: straight quotes
  - name: curved apostrophe
tags:
  - content-design
  - editorial
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - hanging-punctuation
    - prime-mark
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: Straight and curly quotes (Practical Typography)
    url: https://practicaltypography.com/
  - title: The Definitive Guide to Quotes, Apostrophes, and Primes
    url: https://creativepro.com/the-definitive-guide-to-quotes-apostrophes-and-primes/
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: your quotes look like typewriter ticks
---

The straight marks are a hardware compromise. A typewriter had a fixed number of
keys, so one vertical tick stood in for the opening quote, the closing quote, the
apostrophe, and the prime, and ASCII inherited the compromise wholesale. Real
typography has four separate marks for the single and double pairs: `U+2018` and
`U+2019` for single, `U+201C` and `U+201D` for double, each drawn to lean into
the words it encloses. The apostrophe is not a fifth character, it is the right
single quote `U+2019`, which is why a curly apostrophe and a closing single
quote are the same glyph.

Primes are the other half of the confusion. Feet and inches, minutes and
seconds, and coordinates take the prime `U+2032` and double prime `U+2033`, which
are slanted marks and not quotes at all. A straight tick is nobody's correct
answer there either. It is only correct where the character is code: source,
JSON, CSS, shell, HTML attributes, regular expressions, and anything a machine
will parse, where a curly quote is a syntax error and an editor that inserts one
has broken the document.

Autocorrect is what most writing runs on, and it fails predictably at elisions.
Anything that opens with an apostrophe standing in for dropped characters gets
the wrong mark: `’twas`, `rock ’n’ roll`, `the ’90s`, and `’til` all want the
closing form, and every smart-quote engine reaches for the opening one because
it sees a space before it. The other regular failure is the leading apostrophe in
dialect and in abbreviated years. Fixing them by hand is the work; there is no
rule that saves you from reading.

The marks are also local. German uses low-9 opening quotes and a raised closing
pair, French uses guillemets with spaces inside them, and Japanese uses corner
brackets, so a quotation is one of the details a translated interface has to
re-typeset rather than reuse. CSS knows this: the `quotes` property and the `q`
element take a locale-appropriate pair and the `:lang()` selector switches them,
which beats hard-coding a glyph into a template. Store the correct characters in
your content and normalise to straight marks only at the boundary where a search
index or a legacy system demands them.