Obelism
Obelism is the practice of annotating manuscripts with marks set in the margins. Modern obelisms are used by editors blue-penciling a manuscript or typescript. Examples are "stet" (roughly meaning "OK" or to disregard previous mark) and "dele" (for "delete"). An obelos was a particular symbol put by ancient Greek editors in the margins of manuscripts, especially in Homer, to indicate lines that were doubtfully Homer's. There were many other such shorthand symbols, to indicate corrections, emendations, deletions, additions, and so on. Loosely, all these symbols, and the act of annotation by means of them, are obelism. The obelos symbol shares its name with the spit, or sharp end of a lance in ancient Greek. The dotted obelos resembles a percentage sign (%) with the small circles replaced by smaller dots. The dotted obelos is one of the nine ancient Greek textual annotation symbols which are included in the supplemental punctuation list of ISO IEC standard 10646 for character sets. The others are the editorial coronis, the paragraphos, the forked paragraphos, the reversed forked paragraphos, the hypodiastole, the downwards ancora, the upwards ancora, and the dotted right-pointing angle, which is also known as the diple periestigmene.
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