Dagger (mark)

[2] It is one of the modern descendants of the obelus, a mark used historically by scholars as a critical or highlighting indicator in manuscripts.

[7] It represented an iron roasting spit, a dart, or the sharp end of a javelin,[8] symbolizing the skewering or cutting out of dubious matter.

[9][10][11] The obelus is believed to have been invented by the Homeric scholar Zenodotus as one of a system of editorial symbols.

[12][15][18] Epiphanius of Salamis (c. 310–320 – 403) used both a horizontal slash or hook (with or without dots) and an upright and slightly slanting dagger to represent an obelus.

[11] Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) described the use of the symbol as follows: "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 ...

[20][21] In the 16th century, the printer and scholar Robert Estienne (also known as Stephanus in Latin and Stephens in English) used it to mark differences in the words or passages between different printed versions of the Greek New Testament (Textus Receptus).

[5] Additional footnotes are somewhat inconsistent and represented by a variety of symbols, e.g., parallels ( ‖ ), section sign §, and the pilcrow ¶ – some of which were nonexistent in early modern typography.

Partly because of this, superscript numerals have increasingly been used in modern literature in the place of these symbols, especially when several footnotes are required.