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Two editorial brackets that look interchangeable and make opposite claims about whether the text was ever there.
Square brackets mean the surface is damaged and the editor has supplied what they think was written. Angle brackets mean the surface is fine and the writer got it wrong — the editor is adding letters the scribe left out. So square brackets are a statement about the object's condition and angle brackets a statement about the writer's competence, and reading one for the other turns a guess into evidence or an editor's correction into an ancient reading.
Both are editorial supply, but square brackets restore lost text and angle brackets add text the scribe omitted.
| Square brackets (lost text restored) | Angle brackets (scribal omission supplied) | |
|---|---|---|
| State of the object | Damaged, worn or lost at that point | Intact and legible |
| What the editor is doing | Restoring text that is gone | Supplying text the writer omitted |
| What it implies about the original | The text was there and has been destroyed | The text was never there |
| How much to trust it | Varies enormously — a short span in a formulaic text may be near-certain, a long one little more than a guess, and the brackets look the same | Usually secure, because the omission is visible against the surrounding text |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Angle brackets (scribal omission supplied) — Both are editorial supply, but square brackets restore lost text and angle brackets add text the scribe omitted. | Commonly confused with Square brackets (lost text restored) — Both are editorial supply, but square brackets restore lost text and angle brackets add text the scribe omitted. |
The Leiden Conventions define both and are followed widely rather than universally. Some editorial traditions use angle brackets for letters written incorrectly as well as omitted, so an edition's own list of sigla governs where it differs.
The Leiden Conventions for epigraphic and papyrological editions
International Congress of Orientalists (Leiden, 1931) and subsequent revisions · retrieved 2026-08-21
The agreed system of editorial brackets for inscriptions and papyri, in force since 1931 and revised in practice since. Widely followed across classical epigraphy and papyrology and not universally; individual editions and series vary, and an edition's own preface governs.
EpiDoc Guidelines for encoding ancient documents
EpiDoc Collaborative · retrieved 2026-08-21
The community standard for digital editions, which encodes the Leiden brackets explicitly and is therefore an unusually precise statement of what each is taken to assert. Represents current digital practice; print editions may differ.
Look for the horizontal line. Fire is a plain upward triangle; air is the same triangle with a bar drawn across its upper part. Dropping the bar is the commonest error in reproductions of the element set, and it turns air into fire.
The same rule as fire and air, inverted. Water is a plain downward triangle; earth is the same triangle with a bar across its lower part. The four element signs are one designed set: two point up, two point down, and within each pair the bar is the only difference.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
A dram is three scruples. On the page the two symbols are built from the same looped stroke and differ in where a second stroke crosses it, so a hurried hand or a poor copy could turn one into the other and a threefold dosing error with it. Both are obsolete in dispensing, replaced by metric units during the twentieth century, and this pair is the clearest argument for why.