How to type Left Single Quote

‘ lives in the General Punctuation block (U+2000-U+206F), dashes, quotation marks, spaces and reference marks used across languages. Within Unicode it is classified as Pi, an opening quotation mark. Direction-aware quotes distinguish open from close.

What Left Single Quote is used for

‘ belongs in prose rather than in an equation. LaTeX writes it `, 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 left apostrophe and smart. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Left Single Quote is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.

What ‘ gets confused with

Unicode's own confusables table, the one used to catch lookalike domain names, groups ‘ with ' (U+0027, Apostrophe), ` (U+0060, Grave Accent), ´ (U+00B4, Acute Accent), ’ (U+2019, Right Single Quote) and ′ (U+2032, Prime). They are separate characters that render close enough to be mistaken for one another, so a search or a string comparison will separate them where your eye will not. If Left Single Quote is not matching where you expect it to, one of these is the usual reason.

What Unicode says about Left Single Quote

The standard recognises ‘ under another name as well: single turned comma quotation mark. 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+2018 the code chart carries the note “This is the preferred character (as opposed to 201B)”. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.

The code chart points from ‘ to Apostrophe, modifier letter turned comma (U+02BB) and heavy single turned comma quotation mark ornament (U+275B). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Left Single Quote looks nearly right but not quite.

How Left Single Quote behaves in software

‘ is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. 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.

Every way to write Left Single Quote

Encodings and escapes for Left Single Quote (‘)

Form	Value
Codepoint	U+2018
Decimal	8216
UTF-8 bytes	E2 80 98
UTF-16 bytes	20 18
HTML entity	‘
HTML numeric	‘ or ‘
CSS	\2018
JavaScript	\u2018
Python	\u2018
URL-encoded	%E2%80%98
LaTeX, in prose	`
SVG	2018.svg · PNG (SIL Open Font License)

If ‘ arrives as ‘

Its three UTF-8 bytes E2 80 98 are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The text is undamaged; the reader has to be told it is UTF-8.