What › means
It marks a quotation, but doesn't always close it. Single angle quotes usually handle the inner layer of quoted speech. With outward-facing guillemets the pair is ‹…›. German book typography commonly reverses it to ›…‹. Read the pair, not just the direction of the point.
Follow the quotation style of the text you're editing. If you swap every › for an English closing quote, you can turn an opening mark into a closing one.
Where do guillemets come from?
They grew out of a longer tradition of marking quoted text. Ancient Greek editors used the diple, an angle-shaped mark in the margin, to flag passages worth noticing. It belongs to the history of quotation marking, but looking like › doesn't make it the same punctuation character.
Printed quotation marks are documented from 1516, and a guillemet form appears in a 1527 book printed by Josse Bade, a Paris printer. These are milestones for the wider family, not a confirmed birth date for single ›. Over time the marks moved from margin notes to enclosing the quoted words, and each language settled on its own direction and nesting rules.
In ordinary English prose, single guillemets look deliberately styled. Use the document's own quotation marks unless you're following another language's convention.
In code or maths, › can't stand in for >.
Don't confuse it with
3Questions people ask
1Why does › look different in another font?
Because the font draws it. Width, angle, weight and spacing can change while the character stays ›. A sharper or wider shape doesn't turn it into >.
How to type ›
›\203ACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.