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.’”

---

Example Sentences

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

Others speculated that, due to Fennell’s penchant for audience provocation, the quotation marks were an Easter egg indicating that her take on Brontë’s novel would be far from your great-great-grandmother’s “Wuthering Heights.”

From Salon • Feb. 14, 2026

The tweets are written in all caps and are smattered with random old-guy quotation marks, parentheticals, and pejorative nicknames.

From Slate • Aug. 26, 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

Think of quotation marks as bookends that support a quotation in between.

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