Word of the Day:
guillemet
What It Means
Either of the punctuation marks « or » (or ‹ or ›), used in several languages to indicate passages of speech. Similar to typical quotation marks used in the English language, such as “ and ”.
Guillemet in Context
“Guillemets, however, proved popular and remain the key method of indicating quotations in French, Arabic, Italian, Greek and many other languages.”
Did You Know?
From French guillemet, diminutive form of the name Guillaume (“William”), named after French typecutter Guillaume Le Bé (1525–1598) who supposedly invented the marks.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: guillemet (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “guillemet.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/guillemet. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
