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Curled and handed against straight and slanted — two marks substituted for each other in both directions, constantly.
Quotation marks curl and come in handed pairs, like a raised six opening and a raised nine closing. Primes are straight, lean to the right and do not pair: a single prime marks feet or minutes, a double marks inches or seconds. So 6′ 2″ takes primes and “hello” takes quotes, and the straight vertical tick on the keyboard is neither of them — it is a typewriter compromise standing in for all four.
A prime is a straight slanted tick and a quotation mark is a curled one; the two are constantly substituted for each other.
Drawn from the visual attributes recorded for each symbol. Only traits the two records disagree about are listed.
| Trait | Curly quotation marks | Prime and double prime |
|---|---|---|
| Built from | spirals, lines and dots | lines and dots |
| Curly quotation marks | Prime and double prime | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Curled, like a raised comma | Straight and slanted to the right |
| Handed | Yes — opening and closing differ | No — the same mark either side |
| Used for | Quoted speech, cited phrases, and the apostrophe | Feet and inches, arcminutes and arcseconds, derived quantities |
| On the keyboard | Neither — the straight tick substitutes | Neither — the same straight tick substitutes |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Prime and double prime — A prime is a straight slanted tick and a quotation mark is a curled one; the two are constantly substituted for each other. | Commonly confused with Curly quotation marks — A prime is a straight slanted tick and a quotation mark is a curled one; the two are constantly substituted for each other. |
Both are separately encoded and the distinction is not contested. What varies is how much publishers enforce it; the substitution is near-universal in casual text.
Unicode Standard — General Punctuation
The Unicode Consortium · retrieved 2026-08-21
Authoritative for a character's name, codepoint and identity as distinct from a lookalike. Deliberately silent on usage: Unicode encodes marks, it does not prescribe when to set them.
The Elements of Typographic Style
Hartley & Marks · retrieved 2026-08-21
The standard modern reference on typographic practice. Opinionated by design — it argues for particular choices rather than merely recording them — so it is cited for the description of a mark and its history rather than as an authority on what must be done.
Both are drawn as one continuous decorative stroke with a closed loop and a tail that crosses back over itself, which is why a description of the shape alone reaches both. The clef is far taller, spans a stave, and its spiral encircles one specific line — that encircled line is the note G, and it is the only reason the shape is drawn where it is.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
As punctuation the asterisk points at a footnote or marks a required field. In a filename pattern typed at a shell it matches any run of characters, including none — and the shell expands it against real filenames before the command runs, so the command never sees the pattern at all. That expansion is the part people are surprised by.
A single C in a circle asserts copyright. Two C shapes mark a Creative Commons licence — which grants specific permissions while the creator keeps their copyright. A CC badge does not put a work in the public domain, and it does not tell you what you may do on its own: the condition marks beside it carry the terms.