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From a girl here, I'm a neon fugitive, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today, we'll talk about quotation marks and about the different spellings of the word dialogue.

Before we do the piece about quotation marks, I want to note that the author wrote it using the word quote for quotation.

If I were writing it myself, I'd use quotation, but quote has been used to mean quotation for more than 100 years.

And the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Note says that in 2009, 80% of their usage panel accepted that use.

So I decided not to change it.

But I know some of you will notice, and I wanted to give you a heads up.

Here we go.

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The practice of using punctuation to indicate verbatim speech seems to have had its origin in the diply.

A carrot-like ancient Greek marking used to call attention to part of a text.

By the late 15th century, the diply had been replaced by a pair of inverted commas placed in the left margins to indicate quotations.

And by the end of the 18th century, the inverted commas were being used to open and close quoted material.

Single and double quotes battled it out for a time, with double quotes emerging as the norm by the 19th century for quoted speech,

and single quotes for reported speech within a quote.

Quote marks were also used for the titles of articles and other short works.

By the 20th century, editorial conventions for quoting were stable, and quotation marks had been extended to new uses,

such as signaling technical terms, identifying cited words, and to mean so-called, this last of favorite of Henry James.

It's easy to imagine how such new uses emerged.

Quotes for technical terms signaled to the reader that the author is introducing a concept unfamiliar to the reader.

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