How to Type Curly Quotes and Curly Apostrophes

To present a professional appearance in print or to meet the style guidelines of a client, use true typographer quotation marks and apostrophes in your desktop publishing documents. These true quotation and apostrophe marks are curled left and right, unlike the straight single and double quote marks that show on a keyboard's apostrophe key.

Here's how to access and properly use curly quotation marks—also called smart quotes—and proper apostrophes on a Mac or Windows PC.

Many software programs, including Microsoft Word, include settings to enable or disable straight quotes or smart (curly) quotes automatically as you type. If that option isn't activated in your software, make the change as you type.

To manually insert smart quotes, the keyboard must have a numeric keypad. The Num lock key must be activated. To use the numeric codes, press and hold the Alt key, then type the four-digit character code on the numeric keypad.

• Use ALT+0145 and ALT+0146 for the left and right single quotation mark or apostrophe, respectively. 
• Use ALT+0147 and ALT+0148 for the left and right double quotation marks, respectively.

If your keyboard lacks a numeric keypad, use the Character Map. To launch it, press Win+R and type charmap in the Run box. When it opens, find the character you want to insert then press Select. Select Copy when all the characters you want to add have been selected.

The great thing about Character Map is that it supports all possible glyphs within a typeface, not just the ones accessible from the keyboard.

To manually insert smart quotes, type the following keys simultaneously.

• Type Option+] and Shift+Option+] for the left (open) and right (closed) single quote mark or apostrophe, respectively.
• Type Option+[ and Shift+Option+[ for the left and right curved double quotation marks, respectively.

Web typography works a little differently. Smart quotes do not always work well on the web, so straight quotes are used.

However, if you want to add curly quotes to HTML code, do the following:

• For the character for the curly single opening quote mark (or apostrophe), use ‘ and ’, respectively.
• For the character for the curly opening and closing double quotation marks, use “ and ”, respectively.

Oversized curly quotes add interest to pull-quotes in articles or general information pages.

Straight quotes come from the type­writer. In print­ing and typesetting, all quota­tion marks were curly. But type­writer char­ac­ter sets were lim­ited by mechan­i­cal constraints and phys­i­cal space. By re­plac­ing the curly open­ing and clos­ing quotes with am­bidex­trous straight quotes, two slots be­came avail­able for other characters.

The straight marks on the apostrophe key are also called primes. You can use the single straight mark for feet and minutes and the double mark for inches and seconds, as in 1'6" for 1 foot, 6 inches or 30'15" for 30 minutes, 15 seconds.