🧐 Comma Closing Quote Conundrum

Nov 8, 2025

Pinkerbelle hybrid rose flower

Rosa Pinkerbelle

Whew, I have to laugh at myself, although I'm a little abashed that I only just noticed that the comma goes inside a closing quotation mark in American English!

Having spent the first 18 years learning British English and then learning American English later, this realization took way longer than I expected. I first noticed the convention while reading output from the Gemini AI model and initially thought it might be an encoding/decoding error by the Large Language Model (LLM) tokenizer. However, I consistently started seeing it and even saw it in an email from a native American speaker. I thought he must have taken help from an AI model for the write-up! Just to double-check, I finally looked it up, and lo and behold, the revelation floored me—after all these years.

Example

"I like to play soccer every Monday," and "I like to play football every Tuesday", say an American girl and a British boy, respectively.