Word.ws English Dictionary

tortoise shell bracket

tortoise shell bracket noun: either of a pair of symbols,〔 〕, sometimes used in Japanese to enclose comments in quoted text.

Noun

tortoise shell bracket (plural tortoise shell brackets)

  1. Either of a pair of symbols,〔 〕, sometimes used in Japanese to enclose comments in quoted text.

Forms of tortoise shell bracket

pluraltortoise shell brackets
alternative formtortoiseshell bracket

Origin of tortoise shell bracket

Calque from Japanese 亀(きっ)甲(こう)括(かっ)弧(こ) (kikkōkakko, literally “tortoise shell bracket”), due to their resemblance to the shell of a tortoise. By surface analysis, tortoise shell + bracket.

Questions about tortoise shell bracket

What does tortoise shell bracket mean?
Tortoise shell bracket means either of a pair of symbols,〔 〕, sometimes used in Japanese to enclose comments in quoted text.
What part of speech is tortoise shell bracket?
Tortoise shell bracket is a noun.
What is the plural of tortoise shell bracket?
The plural of tortoise shell bracket is tortoise shell brackets.

Words near tortoise shell bracket in the dictionary

  1. tortoise beetles
  2. tortoise core
  3. tortoise cores
  4. Tortoise Islands
  5. tortoise shell
  6. tortoise shell bracket
  7. tortoise shell brackets
  8. tortoise shells
  9. tortoise-like
  10. tortoise-shell
  11. tortoise-shell bamboo

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tortoise shell bracket (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-tortoise shell bracket.wav.

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