U+00AB "«" Left-Pointing Double Angle Quotation Mark Unicode Character

U+00AB "«" Left-Pointing Double Angle Quotation Mark is a punctuation symbol used primarily in French and other European languages to indicate the beginning of a quotation, where it is paired with the right-pointing "»" (U+00BB) to enclose spoken dialogue or cited text. It also appears in mathematics as a symbol for angle brackets and in computer science for bitwise shift operators, though its most common role is in typography, where it is known as a guillemet. In languages like French, a thin space typically separates it from the quoted text inside, distinguishing it from the single chevron used in nested quotations or informal contexts.

General Properties

Code Point	U+00AB
Version Added	1.1
Name	Left-Pointing Double Angle Quotation Mark
Unicode 1.0 Name	Left Pointing Guillemet
Block	Latin-1 Supplement
General Category	Initial Punctuation
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Other Neutral
Mirrored	Yes
Mirrored Character	"»" U+00BB Right-Pointing Double Angle Quotation Mark

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	«
HTML Hex Encoding	«
UTF-8 Encoding	0xC2 0xAB
UTF-16 Encoding	0x00AB
UTF-32 Encoding	0x000000AB
C/C++/Java Escape	\u00ab

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
NFKC Quick Check	Yes
NFKD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Quotation
Script	Common
Script Extensions	Common
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
Pattern Syntax	Yes
Quotation Mark	Yes
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Base	Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break	Other
Word Break	Other
Sentence Break	Close