The Names for French Punctuation Marks and Symbols

Here is a quick reference guide to the names of the most common French symbols and punctuation marks. Note that although French and English use nearly all of the same punctuation marks, some of their uses vary considerably in the two languages. Some English-language marks, such as quotation marks ("), do not exist at all in French, which uses guillemets («  ») instead.

Spacing can also vary, notably the space that precedes every semicolon, colon, exclamation point, and question mark and the spaces that surround marks of two or more parts: all quotation marks and every percent sign, dollar sign, number sign, equal sign, en dash, and em dash, as in:

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How to Use French Punctuation

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Comment vas-tu ? Ah, salut Pierre ! Paul — mon meilleur ami — va arriver demain. Jean a dit : « Je veux le faire. » 

A note about numbers: Numbers of five digits or more, for example, 1,000 and 1,000,000, are written with periods in French, not with commas. So the French version would be 1.000 and 1.000.000 or just a space in place of any punctuation mark (1 000). Decimals, on the other hand, are written with commas in French and not points, as in 1,5 (not 1.5) and 38,92 (not 38.92). So this kind of construction is correct: Our company sold 81,9 percent of the dresses. We had ordered 5.343, which means we had sold about 4.400 dresses.

Common French Punctuation Marks and Symbols

*The correct French term is actually croisillon, but the French erroneously say dièse.

**je_suis@mon-adresse.fr > je underscore suis arobas mon trait d'union adresse point fr