How to type Left Guillemet
To type Left Guillemet («), press Alt + 0171 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + \ on Mac, or write « in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00AB directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00ab on Linux, or 00ab then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Left-Pointing Double Angle Quotation Mark
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00AB
- Windows
- Alt + 0171
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0171 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + \ | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | « | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00AB | LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK |
Symbols related to Left Guillemet
These are filed under brackets and quote in CLDR, the keyword list Unicode publishes alongside the names.
Other punctuation symbols
« lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Pi, an opening quotation mark. Direction-aware quotes distinguish open from close.
What Left Guillemet is used for
« belongs in prose rather than in an equation. LaTeX writes it \guillemotleft, after \usepackage{textcomp}, a text command, and there is no maths command for it at all: it is a sign that gets written down, not an operator that acts on anything. Putting it inside $...$ is how it comes out looking wrong.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for « in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are angle, brackets, carets and chevron. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Left Guillemet is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.
What Unicode says about Left Guillemet
The standard recognises « under another name as well: chevrons (in typography). That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
Unicode annotates « directly. Against U+00AB the code chart carries the note “Usually opening, sometimes closing”. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.
The code chart points from « to much less-than (U+226A) and left double angle bracket (U+300A). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Left Guillemet looks nearly right but not quite.
How Left Guillemet behaves in software
« takes one column in a terminal. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one. It is a mirrored character: in right-to-left text it is drawn reversed, so it keeps pointing at what it pointed at.
What people ask about Left Guillemet
What does the brackets mean in math?
« is LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK, encoded at U+00AB. The Unicode code chart annotates it “Usually opening, sometimes closing”, which is the standard's own statement of what it is for. It is distinct from much less-than (U+226A) and left double angle bracket (U+300A), which the chart lists beside it precisely because they are confused for one another.
Every way to write Left Guillemet
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00AB |
| Decimal | 171 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C2 AB |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 AB |
| HTML entity | « |
| HTML numeric | « or « |
| CSS | \00AB |
| JavaScript | \u00AB |
| Python | \u00AB |
| URL-encoded | %C2%AB |
| LaTeX, in prose | \guillemotleft (needs \usepackage{textcomp}) |
| SVG | 00AB.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If « arrives as «
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C2 AB are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00AB.