How do I type the “ left double quotation mark symbol?

On Windows, type 201C and press Alt+X. On Linux press Ctrl+Shift+U then 201c. On any system the quickest route is the copy button on this page.

What is the code for “?

Left Double Quotation Mark is U+201C, written in HTML as “. In UTF-8 it takes 3 bytes. The table above lists every escape format.

What kind of character is “?

Left Double Quotation Mark is filed under Initial quote in the General Punctuation block, and was introduced in Unicode 1.1. This is an initial quotation mark. Which glyph is "initial" depends on the language — German opens with the mark English uses to close.

U+201C · Initial quote

HTML entity

“

Left Double Quotation Mark Symbol “

“ is left double quotation mark, U+201C. Unicode also records it as “double turned comma quotation mark”. It was added in Unicode 1.1, and Unicode files it under Initial quote.

Also known as

double turned comma quotation mark

Unicode 1.0 called this character double turned comma quotation mark. The standard renamed it later, but documents, fonts and font-editing tools from that era still use the old name.

What Unicode says about “

this is the preferred character (as opposed to 201F)

— annotation from the Unicode Standard, NamesList.txt

Codes & technical data

Unicode	`U+201C`
HTML hex	`“`
HTML decimal	`“`
CSS	`\201C`
JavaScript	`\u{201C}`
Python	`\U0000201C`
Java / C#	`\u201C`
Rust	`\u{201c}`
Swift	`\u{201C}`
PHP	`\u{201C}`
URL encoded	`%E2%80%9C`
UTF-8 bytes	`E2 80 9C`
UTF-16 bytes	`201C`
Base64	`4oCc`
Decimal	`8220`
HTML entity	`“`
Category	Initial quote (Pi)
Introduced	Unicode 1.1

Will “ survive being pasted?

Normalisation. Yes. “ is unchanged by NFKC, so it survives normalising systems intact.
Legacy encodings. “ is Unicode-only — it has no Latin-1 equivalent, so a system stuck on an 8-bit encoding cannot represent it.
Size. 3 bytes in UTF-8. Character-limited fields — SMS, bios, some form validators — usually count bytes, not characters.

Unicode cross-references

The standard points readers of “ at these characters — usually because they look alike, or because one is the correct choice where the other is often used by mistake.

Other quotation characters

Unicode names 14 characters ending in “quotation”. They differ by direction, weight or decoration rather than by meaning.

Nearby in General Punctuation

The typographic marks that word processors quietly substitute for their ASCII lookalikes — real quotation marks, en and em dashes, the ellipsis. It also holds the invisible characters: zero-width spaces, joiners and directional marks that do work without drawing anything.

All 71 characters in General Punctuation →

How to type “

Windows	Type `201C` then press `Alt`+`X`
macOS	Press `Ctrl`+`Cmd`+`Space`, then search for “left double quotation mark”
Linux	Press `Ctrl`+`Shift`+`U`, type `201c`, press `Enter`
HTML	`“`

About Unicode’s Initial quote category

This is an initial quotation mark. Which glyph is "initial" depends on the language — German opens with the mark English uses to close.

Frequently asked questions

How do I type the “ left double quotation mark symbol?: On Windows, type 201C and press Alt+X. On Linux press Ctrl+Shift+U then 201c. On any system the quickest route is the copy button on this page.
What is the code for “?: Left Double Quotation Mark is U+201C, written in HTML as “. In UTF-8 it takes 3 bytes. The table above lists every escape format.
What kind of character is “?: Left Double Quotation Mark is filed under Initial quote in the General Punctuation block, and was introduced in Unicode 1.1. This is an initial quotation mark. Which glyph is "initial" depends on the language — German opens with the mark English uses to close.