Curly quotes are the quotation marks used in proper typography. There are four curly quote characters: the opening single quote (‘), the closing single quote (’), the opening double quote (“), and the closing double quote (”).

In traditional printing and typography, all quotation marks are curly. Compared to straight quotes, curly quotes are more legible on the page and match the other characters better. Although there are no keys assigned to curly quotes, most modern word processors have the smart quotes feature. When turned on, it automatically changes straight quotes to curly.^[1]