Single High-Reversed-9 Quotation Mark

It opens a single quotation.

Quotation marks began as marginal signs flagging citations. Christian books marked biblical citations by the fifth century; such signs spread in the sixth century. In some print traditions, inverted commas replaced margin marks by the late fifteenth century. Comma-shaped metal type followed in the early sixteenth century; quotation marks began enclosing text by the end of the eighteenth century.

Font fallback can make ‛ look like an apostrophe

As of September 2026, Unicode's fallback data may map it to a plain apostrophe when the glyph is unavailable.