Talk:Dagger (mark)

Pun?

"The names of the comic-book heroes Astérix and Obélix come from a pun on the French names of the asterisk and the obelisk."

And that's relevant to this article how....? --Menchi 18:04, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The article is about the typographic obelisk, the asterisk is another typographic symbol. -- Error 23:57, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Does the name "Obélix" really refer to the typographic obelisk or the fact he delivers Obelisks (menhirs) for a living? --Thomasdelbert 23:00, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

---

Is it supposed to be superscripted? ^†? - Omegatron July 1, 2005 03:45 (UTC)

Obelus

I know that "obelus" commonly refers to the division sign (horizontal bar wtih one dot above and one below). Meriam Webster does not include the dagger in the meaning of obelus, at least in the online abridged version. Is this correct?

---

And here I was thinking that the "double dagger" was called "Cross of Lorraine" which, as far as I know is a more correct name for the symbol in question.

[Beginning of comment by trecord]I added a "citation needed" as it appears to be a dubious claim on its surface. I'm also promoting it to a dispute. I suggest we let the claim stand for now (perhaps the next 30 days?) to allow time to find a citation. If none's found after a reasonable amount of time (say by February 3?), I suggest we delete it. trecord (talk) 08:54, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Well that was short: I found one, but I had to go all the way to the OED to find it. In my book that just underscores the complete obscurity in which the term 'obelus' is used in that context. -- trecord (talk) 09:16, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Upside-down dagger

Why there's no information about upside-down dagger and it's usage in philosophical semantics?--141.70.82.221 11:29, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Possible contradiction.

In reference to the double dagger, the beginning reads: A double dagger (‡, ‡, U+2021) is a variant with two "handles", and is also called a diesis or Cross of Lorraine.

However, towards the bottom, it reads: The double dagger should not be confused with the cross of Lorraine or the patriarchal cross.

Which is it? 75.142.145.99 (talk) 16:18, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

I noticed that too, but I don't know either, so I added a {{Contradict}} template at the top of the article. László (talk) 12:44, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Fonts

"Dagger and double-dagger symbols in a variety of fonts" Which fonts are they? 167.153.5.196 (talk) 22:00, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Per the image description - DejaVu Serif, Times New Roman, LTC Remington Typewriter, Garamond, Old English Text MT. Shimgray | talk | 18:15, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

'Dagger character' ...

A very minor suggestion is to have the entry 'dagger character' directed to this page. 66.191.19.68 (talk) 22:44, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Sub-sections

It might be good to break the "usage" section into subsection in order to focus links. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 09:25, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Christian Cross

I don't see why this page seems so adamant about the dagger not being confused with the crucifix--the Christian cross. I understand that in formal situations it is implemented in the uses discussed in the article, but plenty of Christian Internet users (particularly on the gaming client Steam) use it to display their Christianity or their participation in a Christian group. Venku Tur'Mukan (talk) 16:41, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Because it's not? We don't propagate misconceptions, we correct it. The Hindu, Jain, and Native American swastika is similarly frequently confused with the Nazi symbol, but that still does not mean they are Nazis, does it? -- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 16:51, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

If you go to the German language entry, it turns out that they refer to this object we are talking about here as a 'cross'. The article includes comments about Germans being less enthusiastic about using this symbol, maybe this is why. The article should include this aspect. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Stderr (talk • contribs) 05:54, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Unicode

The inclusion of Unicode code points (etc) in the intro does not make clear whether we are talking about a typographic subject or something to do with computing. For sure, the two have an obvious relationship and deserve to be mentioned, but surely we are talking about daggers and not the particular numbers which in various character encodings happen to correspond to various kinds of daggers. It is no different to mentioning that a dagger appears in the nth position in some type foundry's standard collection of letters.

122.59.249.222 (talk) 11:49, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Soundgarden's song "4th of July"

As you can see here (http://images.coveralia.com/audio/s/Soundgarden-Superunknown-Trasera.jpg) on the back of the album of "Superunknown" a dagger is present next to the track "4th of July." Does anybody know why? Mrmoustache14 (talk) 18:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Dagger symbol for marking KIA

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history#Dagger symbol, confused with cross symbol, alternate symbols, and default settings for template:KIA for a summary of everything that I could find.

Use that thread/page for further discussion, to keep things centralized in a high-activity area. Thanks. –Quiddity (talk) 22:13, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

Triple dagger

‡̶

What would we call this? A triasis? I noticed this posted at https://twitter.com/hoeflerco/status/520683606814257152 and wanted to know if we could include it.

Someone appears to have these in some fonts called F1D2 or &tridagger;

• http://www.typophile.com/node/10860
• http://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/m.php?p=muficharinfo&i=5144
• http://folk.uib.no/hnooh/mufi/pipeline/pipeline-for-v4.html (15. From Pascale)
  • http://folk.uib.no/hnooh/mufi/pipeline/proposals/MUFIEingabeSSRQ-2011.pdf when I paste from page 7 shows ⁄
  • http://folk.uib.no/hnooh/mufi/proposals/n4704-medieval-punct.pdf when I paste from page 2 shows ⹙

I don't know if it's widespread enough to observe though. Here is a possible cite...

• Warzel, Charlie (26 April 2016). "Inside "Emojigeddon": The Fight Over The Future Of The Unicode Consortium". Though Everson managed to get two characters of medieval punctuation accepted at the last UTC meeting, he was dismayed that those accepted, including "the triple dagger" (which looks like three small swords stacked on top of one another), weren't "particularly important to medievalists or really medieval at all." Meanwhile, the consortium has accepted 79 new emoji proposals as candidates for its next emoji release

Related to the above source is http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15327r-n4704-medieval-punct.pdf published 25 January 2016 which mentions this on pages 2 and 5 (2.11 and 3.3) and 6 (before Bibliography)

Right now, while I am able to view the triple dagger characters in the two PDFs from folk.UIB.no, when I copy and paste them here into Wikipedia, they display as a forward slash / and a box character. I think maybe because the Wikipedia test editor displays a font not able to display them while the PDFs read in a font that can display them.

I don't know how to resolve that here if we did write the 3dagger here. For now, I'm going to cite Warzel with reference to the unicode.org document but I don't know how to actually get this to display as a character, we might only be able to do so as a picture unless Wikipedia incorporated this unicode font into its display? ScratchMarshall (talk) 19:36, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Unclear difference

What difference is between "LATIN CROSS" and "DAGGER" characters(I'm talking about these that look identical) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.173.233.212 (talk) 21:17, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Visually, it depends on the font. The ones I've looked at generally have a longer descender on the dagger than the cross. Beyond that, U+2020 † DAGGER is classified in Unicode as a punctuation mark while U+271D ✝ LATIN CROSS is classified as a symbol and its default presentation is emoji. DRMcCreedy (talk) 00:26, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

In serif fonts, the difference is more evident. See † (dagger), ✝ (latin cross). It does depend on the font: in some, the handle of the dagger is quite rounded. NB that what I see may not be what you get because your system may have a different default serif font from mine. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 00:59, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Proposal to move this article to Dagger (mark)

Broadly speaking, typography is about the design, layout and typesetting of a document (page, book, etc), using glyphs (letters, symbols, sign, spaces) and images. The dagger mark is just another symbol and it is just strange (to my eyes) to disambiguate using (typography) rather than (symbol) like every other ambiguously named symbol. Quite a few articles link here so rather than just WP:BEBOLD, I thought it best to ask have I missed something, why has no one done it before? I can't see a that a full RtM process is needed, is it? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 18:39, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

My original proposal was to move to Dagger (symbol) but, as the OED calls it a 'mark', I have revised the proposal accordingly but the significant action, to move away from 'typography' is unchanged. Given that there have been no comments and silence signifies assent, I will do the move now. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 15:22, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

cross not dagger

Not sure what mental gymnastics some of you had to hoop through to call a crucifix a dagger 67.6.241.113 (talk) 12:16, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

None. The article says that the dagger symbols are "not to be confused with" the various forms of cross. Indeed the article notes that in Germany, the symbol is only ever used as a cross, never to call out a footnote. "Your mileage may vary". --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:55, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

The origin and evolution of the mark is covered in the history section of the article; it is not a Christian cross. It is also clearly not a crucifix in any case as there is no figure of Jesus fixed to it. WP Ludicer (talk) 21:12, 10 February 2023 (UTC)