Guillemets may also be called angle, Latin, Castilian, Spanish, or French quotes / quotation marks.[citation needed]
Guillemet is a diminutive of the French name Guillaume, apparently after the French printer and punchcutterGuillaume Le Bé (1525–1598),[5] though he did not invent the symbols: they first appear in a 1527 book printed by Josse Bade.[6] Some languages derive their word for guillemets analogously: the Irish term is Liamóg, from Liam 'William' and a diminutive suffix.[citation needed]
In Adobe software, its file format specifications, and in all fonts derived from these that contain the characters, the glyph names are incorrectly spelled guillemotleft and guillemotright (a malapropism: guillemot is actually a species of seabird). Adobe has acknowledged the error.[7] Likewise, X11 mistakenly uses XK_guillemotleft and XK_guillemotright to name keys producing the characters.
Microsoft Word uses guillemets when creating mail merges. Microsoft use these punctuation marks to denote a mail merge "field", such as «Title», «AddressBlock» or «GreetingLine». On the final printout, the guillemet-marked tags are replaced by each instance of the corresponding data item intended for that field by the user.
Encoding
Double guillemets are present in many 8-bit extended ASCII character sets. They were at 0xAE and 0xAF (174 and 175) in CP437 on the IBM PC, and 0xC7 and 0xC8 in Mac OS Roman, and placed in several of ISO 8859 code pages (namely: -1, -7, -8, -9, -13, -15, -16) at 0xAB and 0xBB (171 and 187).
Microsoft added the single guillemets to CP1252 and similar sets used in Windows at 0x8B and 0x9B (139 and 155) (where the ISO standard placed C1 control codes).
The ISO 8859 locations were inherited by Unicode, which added the single guillemets at new locations:
U+00AB«LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
U+00BB»RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
U+2039‹SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
U+203A›SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
Despite their names, the characters are mirrored when used in right-to-left contexts.
^This applies to all English-language keyboard layouts supplied with the Apple operating system, e.g. "Australian", "British", "Canadian", "Irish", "Irish Extended", "U.S." and "U.S. Extended". Other language layouts may differ.
See also
A related pair of symbols, 'angle brackets' (a single chevron), ⟨ and ⟩, is used for another purpose, in mathematics and computing.
^Adobe Systems Inc. (1999). PostScript Language Reference: The Red Book (3rd ed.). Addison Wesley. Character set endnote 3, page 783. ISBN978-0-201-37922-8. OCLC40927139.