What ‹ means
It opens a single guillemet pair. Pair it with › around quoted words; inside «…», it often marks a nested quotation.
The guillemet form is attested in print by 1527, while the French word “guillemet” is documented from 1677. Printers used angle quotation marks to set off quoted speech, cited passages, or a word discussed in the text.
In many systems, «…» frames the outer quotation and ‹…› marks a quotation inside it. The exact nesting rules depend on the language.
Why does its use change by language?
Quotation rules change with the language. Each language sets its own opening and closing direction, spacing, and nesting rules.
Unicode describes guillemets as common in European typography. French uses «…» for an outer quotation and may use ‹…› inside; Swiss print also uses angle quotation marks. Some German book typography points the marks inward, opposite the French direction, while some languages have shifted toward curly quotation marks. That can make ‹ feel formal, regional, or old-fashioned to different readers.
In English, formal or deliberately typographic; elsewhere, follow the local quotation convention.
Don’t replace ‹ with <: the latter is a comparison sign or markup character.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsDon't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
1Why does ‹ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type ‹
‹\2039Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.