Fullwidth Apostrophe

It fills one East Asian character cell.

A zenkaku apostrophe is this full-width form; extra apostrophe spacing in English usually points to an input-width setting or font mismatch. In Japanese or Chinese grid-based text, fullwidth punctuation can be deliberate because Latin letters and their punctuation line up with the surrounding character cells.

How did the fullwidth apostrophe start?

Its story belongs to mixed-width computer text. Half-width katakana were in use by 1969, and full-width character sets appeared in 1978 as Japanese computing adapted text to square-grid layouts. Those are milestones in the wider width system, not the first-use date of this apostrophe.

This exact form's recorded encoding trail includes JIS X 0213:2000, a Japanese character-set standard. Unicode keeps it as a compatibility form so older mixed-width text can round-trip.

Use it when width matters

For Chinese and Japanese fixed-grid composition, fullwidth punctuation aligns Latin marks with the surrounding character cells. Korean text more commonly uses proportional punctuation, so this width choice is less typical there. Its width signals a layout choice, not a special emotional tone.

For ordinary Latin-script text, the narrow ' is the usual choice unless the layout or software expects full-width characters. Exact string matching treats ＇ and ' as different; NFKC, Unicode's compatibility-normalization mode, removes that width distinction.