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Daggers around text the editor believes is corrupt and cannot repair.
Also known as: Crux, Obelus (editorial mark), Daggers around a word, Cross of desperation
A pair of daggers fencing off a passage means the editor has given up. The text as transmitted does not make sense, no proposed correction has convinced, and rather than print a guess the editor marks the wound and moves on.
A dagger placed before and after a passage in a critical edition, marking text the editor judges corrupt beyond confident repair.
Contexts: History
An admission rather than a correction. The editor is stating that the transmitted text cannot be right, that the proposed emendations have not persuaded, and that printing one of them would misrepresent the state of knowledge.
Descends from the obelus, a mark used by Alexandrian scholars to flag lines they judged spurious, which is the root of the dagger's long association with doubtful text.
Two dagger marks — an upright stroke crossed near the top by a shorter horizontal line — placed one before and one after a span of text.
The crux uses the dagger glyph in a specialised editorial sense distinct from its footnote use.