quotation marks

Cultural  

1. Punctuation marks (“ ”) that set off dialogue, quoted material, titles of short works, and definitions. When something must be quoted inside a quotation, single quotation marks are used: “‘Religion,’ according to Karl Marx (see also Marx), ‘is the opiate of the masses.’”

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Example Sentences

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quotation marks

And by my use of quotation marks, I mean the public Fauci, as opposed to the private Fauci.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 30, 2026

The concept of being picky was born, though it was still so new a word that food marketers put it in quotation marks.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 20, 2026

James Joyce’s "Ulysses" rained em dashes on winding sentences that he had already stripped of quotation marks, resulting in prose so unruly that numerous reading groups are devoted specifically to parsing it.

From Salon ● Jun. 11, 2025

Berlant, a gifted physical comic who whipsaws between over-the-top grandeur and abject awkwardness, introduces her situations with a wink — and even the winks are delivered in quotation marks.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 24, 2024

In most cases, a question mark should be inside the quotation marks.

From "Woe Is I" by Patricia T. O'Conner