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The brackets, dots and daggers printed in editions of inscriptions, papyri and classical texts. The system exists to hold one line: what survives on the object against what the editor supplied. Square brackets restore text that is lost, angle brackets add what the scribe omitted, braces delete what the scribe wrongly included, round brackets expand an abbreviation — four different claims that look almost identical on the page. A dotted letter is evidence read cautiously; a bracketed letter is not evidence at all. Most readers who meet these marks have never been told they are a defined system, agreed at Leiden in 1931 and followed widely rather than universally, which is why several records say to check the edition's own preface.
The bracket system that separates what survives on a stone from what an editor supplied.
Text inside them is gone from the object and supplied by the editor.
Text the editor adds because the ancient writer left it out.
Text present on the object that the editor judges a mistake.
Letters the editor supplies to spell out an abbreviation the writer used.
A dot beneath a letter: visible on the object but not certainly that letter.
Dots or a rule showing a gap where text is missing entirely.
A note that a blank space on the object is deliberate, not damage.
Slashes showing where the lines of the original object break.
Notation for text deliberately removed from the object in antiquity.
The dense block of sigla at the foot of a scholarly edition recording variant readings.
Daggers around text the editor believes is corrupt and cannot repair.
The ancient mark for a line the scholar judged not to belong.
In scholarship, a form nobody attested — reconstructed, not recorded.
A note that an oddity was in the original and is not a printing error.