typography - When a dagger is used to indicate a note, must it come after an asterisk?


The typographical symbol dagger (†) has several meanings. Possibly its most common use is as a footnote marker.


According to You Have a Point There: A Guide to Punctuation and Its Allies (Partridge, 1953), when it is used for this purpose, it must be used for second footnotes only; the first footnote should be indicated by an asterisk (*), the third a double dagger (‡) and further footnotes other symbols or numbers.


Where does Patridge's rule fall on a scale of one to ten, where one is "this is just one guy's random opinion" and ten is "this is a widely accepted rule of English and any deviation from it is unarguably incorrect"?


This question was inspired by this Meta Stack Overflow question about the use of daggers on Stack Exchange site FAQ pages.



Answer



The dagger (also known as an obelisk) is properly used for the second footnote. The asterisk is for the first, and the double dagger is for the third. This is supported by several websites:



And so on. The general consensus is that the asterisk is first, the dagger is second, and the double dagger is third. I give him a 9.


Edit: I looked at the Chicago Manual of Style Online, and they gave this information:



Where symbols are used, the sequence is as follows:



  1. * (asterisk; but do not use if p values occur in the table; see 3.78)

  2. † (dagger)

  3. ‡ (double dagger)

  4. § (section mark)

  5. || (parallels)

  6. # (number sign, or pound)



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