unquote

Imagine you're telling a story or dictating a message and you want to repeat exactly what someone else said. Since your listener can't see the page, you say "quote" to start the statement and unquote to signal that the spoken part is over. While we use visual marks (" ") in writing, "unquote" acts as a verbal punctuation mark. It is most common in formal settings like legal transcripts, radio broadcasts, or news reporting, where it's important to distinguish between the speaker's own words and the person they are citing. It's like saying, "Okay, that's the end of the borrowed words; I'm back to speaking for myself now."

"Unquote" is used to show that a quoted part of speech or text has ended. In writing, we normally do this with closing quotation marks, but in speech there is no visible punctuation, so "unquote" can do that job out loud. It usually appears with "quote," forming a spoken pair that marks where borrowed words begin and end.

You are most likely to hear it in careful, formal, or old-fashioned speech, especially in legal settings, dictation, broadcasting, or any situation where the speaker wants to make the boundaries of a quotation very clear. For example, someone might say, The witness stated, quote, I saw him leave, unquote. That tells the listener exactly which words belong to the witness and which words belong to the person reporting them. In everyday conversation, people also use it in the fixed phrase "quote-unquote," often to show distance, doubt, or mild irony about a word or expression. There is also a technical use in some programming languages, but for most learners the main idea is simple: it is a spoken way to close a quotation and return to the speaker's own voice.