#1 After Finding This, My Wife And I Refer To Anything Naughty As "Bible Reading"
#3 This Sign Has Been In My Family Since I Was A Kid And Was Passed On To Me By My Dad When My Wife And I Married
There is something faintly ominous about a quotation mark in the wrong place. A sign promising “fresh” fish or insisting you are “welcome” here does not exactly inspire confidence.
But when used correctly, quotation marks are one of the most common punctuation marks in everyday writing—found in books, articles, signs, and menus all over the world. Simple as they seem, they have a surprisingly long and interesting history behind them.
Their story begins in ancient Greece, where a librarian named Aristarchus at the Library of Alexandria invented a small arrow-shaped mark called the diple, named after the two pen strokes it took to draw it.
He wrote it in the margins of scrolls next to lines he thought were worth noting. At this stage, the mark had nothing to do with quoting someone’s words. It was simply a way of saying: something here is interesting.
That changed during the Middle Ages, when the spread of Christianity created a huge demand for copied texts. Writers quoted the Bible constantly to support their arguments, and the diple became the go-to symbol for marking those quotations.
Scribes wrote it in the margins next to the relevant lines, and over the centuries its shape kept changing, appearing as dots, squiggles, curves, horizontal strokes, crosses, and all kinds of other variations depending on who was copying the text and where.
The printing press, invented in the 1440s, put an end to all that variety. Gutenberg’s printers wanted to keep the number of characters they had to carve and cast to a minimum, and the diple was one of the first things to go.
From the 16th century on, printers used a pair of commas instead—nobody has ever quite worked out why—and later rotated them to create matching opening and closing marks. For the first time, there was a single, consistent system that everyone could follow.
By the 17th century, these marks had moved out of the margins and into the text itself, sitting at the start and end of a quoted passage.
The rise of the novel in the 18th century pushed things even further, as writers used quotation marks to capture characters’ dialogue, with all its accents and slang. What had started as a small mark in the margin had become an essential part of how stories were told.
By the 19th century, different parts of the world had settled into their own styles. In Western Europe it became standard to use paired marks with the curves facing outward; Britain raised them to the height of capital letters, while France developed angular marks by the end of the century—what we now call guillemets.
The quotation mark had become a normal, familiar part of written language almost everywhere.
