What ❛ means
It is a display ornament shaped like an opening quote.
Turned-comma quotation marks have a longer typographic story: during the sixteenth century, printers moved quotation cues from page margins into printed text. English printers made comma-shaped marks part of quotation punctuation by the early eighteenth century.
❛ sits on the ornamental side of this history. Dingbats are small printed symbols used for decoration or layout; Zapf Dingbats developed during 1975–1978 as a collection of printer’s embellishments and graphic symbols, and its ITC edition was licensed in 1978.
It reads as a print flourish: editorial and layout-conscious, rather than conversational.
Use your language’s standard quotation mark in continuous prose; ❛ can look like an accidental font change.
Part of collections
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsA deliberately heavy decorative quotation pair.
Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
2
Combination ideas
4Questions people ask
1Why does ❛ look different between fonts?
It varies by font: each typeface draws the ornament in its own style, so its shape and weight can change in the finished text.
More like this
12
Collections with ❛
4
How to type or find ❛
- Search it as
- turned quote · quote ornament · heavy quote · decorative quote · opening quote · dingbat quote · curly quote
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
❛\275BCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.