The character is represented by 39 in ASCII and in Unicode. It is used as:
Apostrophe (as straight version of the character), a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark Single quotation mark (as straight version of the and characters)
Informal use Being supplied as standard on many keyboard layouts, it is often used in informal contexts to replace other similar looking characters that include:
Diacritical marks Acute accent (), a diacritic used in many modern written languages
Aleph (), is the first letter of the Semitic abjads Apex (diacritic) (), a diacritic used to indicate a long vowel in Latin Dakuten, Japanese diacritic
Geresh (), a sign in Hebrew writing Smooth breathing or (), a diacritical mark used in polytonic orthography Tonos (), single diacritic that indicates stress in monotonic orthography for Modern Greek Keraia (diacritic) () a symbol used in Greek numerals
Modifier letter punctuation Modifier letter apostrophe (), a glyph used primarily to represent various glottal sounds Modifier letter left half ring (), a character used to transliterate the letter ayin, representing the sound ʕ Modifier letter right half ring () Modifier letter turned comma ()
Other uses as accents, pronunciation, or stress Okina (), commonly representing a phonemic glottal stop in various Polynesian languages Ejective consonant (), used in the International Phonetic Alphabet Greek diacritics ()()()(), marks added to letters in Greek (particularly Ancient Greek) sometimes in combination (eg. or ) Saltillo (linguistics) ( or ), a glottal stop consonant, ʔ Stress (linguistics) (), relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word
Units of measure Prime (symbol) (), used to designate units and for other purposes in mathematics, the sciences, linguistics, and music Foot (unit), a unit of length in the imperial and US customary systems of measurement Minute, a unit of time Minute of arc, a unit of arc
See also Apostrophe (disambiguation) Comma, a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages, above as well as below the baseline Inverted comma, the name used in traditional British typography for the single quotation mark