‡ DOUBLE DAGGER

A dagger, obelisk, or obelus † is a typographical symbol that usually indicates a footnote if an asterisk has already been used. It is one of the modern descendants of the obelus, a mark used historically by scholars as a critical or highlighting indicator in manuscripts. (The term obelisk derives from the Greek: ὀβελίσκος (obeliskos), which means “little obelus”; from ὀβελός (obelos) meaning ‘roasting spit’).

The dagger symbol originated from a variant of the obelus, originally depicted by a plain line − or a line with one or two dots ÷. It represented an iron roasting spit, a dart, or the sharp end of a javelin, symbolizing the skewering or cutting out of dubious matter.

The obelus is believed to have been invented by the Homeric scholar Zenodotus as one of a system of editorial symbols. They marked questionable or corrupt words or passages in manuscripts of the Homeric epics.

While the asterisk (asteriscus) was used for corrective additions, the obelus was used for corrective deletions of invalid reconstructions. It was used when non-attested words are reconstructed for the sake of argument only, implying that the author did not believe such a word or word form had ever existed.

“an asterisk makes a light shine, the obelisk cuts and pierces”. “The obelus is appended to words or phrases uselessly repeated, or else where the passage involves a false reading, so that, like the arrow, it lays low the superfluous and makes the errors disappear … The obelus accompanied by points is used when we do not know whether a passage should be suppressed or not.”

In addition to this, the dagger was also used in notations in early Christianity, to indicate a minor intermediate pause in the chanting of Psalms