Ditto mark

″
Ditto mark
Punctuation apostrophe ( ’ ' ) brackets ( [ ], ( ), { }, ⟨ ⟩ ) colon ( : ) comma ( , ، 、 ) dash ( ‒, –, —, ― ) ellipsis ( …, ..., . . . ) exclamation mark ( ! ) full stop / period ( . ) guillemets ( « » ) hyphen ( ‐ ) hyphen-minus ( - ) question mark ( ? ) quotation marks ( ‘ ’, “ ”, ' ', " " ) semicolon ( ; ) slash / stroke / solidus ( /,  ⁄  ) Word dividers interpunct ( · ) space ( ) ( ) ( ) General typography ampersand ( & ) asterisk ( * ) at sign ( @ ) backslash ( \ ) bullet ( • ) caret ( ^ ) dagger ( †, ‡ ) degree ( ° ) ditto mark ( ″ ) inverted exclamation mark ( ¡ ) inverted question mark ( ¿ ) number sign / pound / hash ( # ) numero sign ( № ) obelus ( ÷ ) ordinal indicator ( º, ª ) percent, per mil ( %, ‰ ) basis point ( ‱ ) pilcrow ( ¶ ) prime ( ′, ″, ‴ ) section sign ( § ) tilde ( ~ ) underscore / understrike ( _ ) vertical bar / broken bar / pipe ( ¦, | ) Intellectual property copyright symbol ( © ) registered trademark ( ® ) service mark ( ℠ ) sound recording copyright ( ℗ ) trademark ( ™ ) Currency currency (generic) ( ¤ ) currency (specific) ( ₳ ฿ ₵ ¢ ₡ ₢ ₠ $ ₫ ৳ ₯ € ƒ ₣ ₲ ₴ ₭ ₺ ℳ ₥ ₦ ₧ ₱ ₰ £ ₹ ₨ ₪ ₸ ₮ ₩ ¥ ៛ ) Uncommon typography asterism ( ⁂ ) index / fist ( ☞ ) interrobang ( ‽ ) irony punctuation ( ؟ ) lozenge ( ◊ ) reference mark ( ※ ) tie ( ⁀ ) Related diacritical marks logic symbols whitespace characters non-English quotation style ( « », „ ” ) In other scripts Chinese punctuation Hebrew punctuation Japanese punctuation Korean punctuation
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The ditto mark (or Stenoien Mark^{[citation needed]}) (″) is a typographic symbol indicating that the word(s) or figure(s) above it are to be repeated. For example:

Black pens, box of twenty	.....	£2.10
Blue   ″     ″  ″   ″	.....	£2.35

The word ditto comes from the Tuscan language, where it is the past participle of the verb dire (to say), with the meaning of “said”, as in the locution “the said story”. The first recorded use of ditto with this meaning in English occurs in 1625. Early evidence of ditto marks can be seen on a cuneiform tablet of the Neo-Assyrian period (934 – 608 BC) where two vertical marks are used in a table of synonyms to repeat text, while in China the corresponding mark is two horizontal lines (二); see iteration mark.

An advertisement from 1833. The second item on the list can be read as "Prime American Pork, in barrels", while the third is "Prime American Pork, in Half barrels".

Unicode points to U+2033 ″ double prime (HTML: ″ ″) to be used (see below). In practice, however, closing double quotation marks (”) or straight double quotation marks (") are often used instead. The abbreviation do. is also used.

Unicode

For the Western scripts, including Latin, Unicode has not defined a ditto character. However, to the East Asian ditto mark Unicode has added the note: See also: U+2033 ″ double prime (see below).

In Unicode, there is a charcacter U+3003 〃 ditto mark (HTML: 〃 block: CJK Symbols and Punctuation). Its Script_Extensions property specifies scrips that use the mark: Bopomofo, Hangul, Han, Hiragana and Katakana. That is, East Asian scripts, shortly named CJK. So according to Unicode research, this ditto mark graph is not found to be used in Western (Latin) script, and is supposed not to be used in there.

See also

• Ibid.
• Iteration mark
• Dittography