About Dagger
Dagger is the Unicode character † at codepoint U+2020 in the General Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The second mark in the traditional footnote sequence, after the asterisk and before the double dagger. Unicode files it as Po in General Punctuation with three formal aliases — obelisk, long cross and oblong cross — and one cross-reference, to the turned dagger. It is one of the few characters in that block with a Windows-1252 slot, at byte 0x86, which is why it comes through legacy pipelines when most of its neighbours do not. Outside typography it carries meaning of its own: placed beside a name it marks a death, beside a taxon an extinction, and before a reconstructed word form a scholar's assertion that the form never existed.
Typical uses
- The second footnote or reference mark on a page
- Marking a death date, an extinct taxon or an unattested form
- Flagging a passage as doubtful, the job the mark was invented for
At a glance
- U+2020, General Punctuation; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category Po
- East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class AI; Windows-1252 byte 0x86
- HTML: † — one name, and no semicolon-less legacy form
- Aliases: obelisk, long cross, oblong cross
Historical Notes
Origins
The mark descends from the obelos of Alexandrian textual scholarship. Unicode preserves the connection in its own aliases rather than in prose: obelisk is a formal alias of this character, so the ancient name is part of the standard's record of it.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, in General Punctuation — and, unusually for that block, with a Windows-1252 byte behind it at 0x86. Exactly fifteen of the block's characters have such a byte: this mark, the double dagger, the ellipsis, the per mille sign, the four curly quotes and the two low-9 quotes, the en and em dashes, the bullet and the two single guillemets. That list is very nearly a complete inventory of the characters from this block a reader meets in ordinary text.
The mark that never lost its meaning
Most punctuation drifted away from what it was invented for. This one did not: the Alexandrian obelos flagged a passage as suspect, and the modern dagger still marks the dead, the extinct and the unattested. The specific conventions vary by discipline and this note does not attempt to enumerate them, but the underlying gesture — this is not to be taken at face value — is the same one.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Dagger
To use the Dagger symbol (†) in HTML, insert the
entity † directly into your markup. The decimal entity † works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\2020';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2020' evaluates to †. In Python source, write '\u2020'.
The character encodes to E2 80 A0 as UTF-8 bytes and 2020 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8224.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.
Things to know
- Windows-1252 byte 0x86, so it survives legacy pipelines. Mis-decoded UTF-8 shows it as the three-character sequence †, with a no-break space at the end that is easy to miss.
- Exactly one HTML name, †, and no semicolon-less legacy form. Its doubled sibling has two names, one of which differs from this one only in capitalisation.
- East Asian Width Ambiguous, line break class AI.
- No decomposition; stable under all four normalisation forms.
- Pattern_Syntax applies, so pattern grammars treat it as syntax rather than as an identifier character.
In the Wild
On 5 August 2026 English Wikipedia's article on the dagger carried nine of them, its article on the obelus five, its article on notes in typography four, and the Japanese Wikipedia article on punctuation three. It also appears one at a time on typography pages carrying the punctuation navigation template — the mark listed as a specimen rather than used as one.
Almost all of it is exposition. The footnote sequence the dagger belongs to has been replaced by numbers nearly everywhere that publishes at speed, so the places that still print the character are mostly the places explaining what it was for. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
What does a dagger next to a name mean?
A death. Beside a taxon it marks extinction, and before a reconstructed word form it marks a form the author says never existed.
Where does it come in the footnote sequence?
Second, after the asterisk and before the double dagger. Beyond the first three marks the sequence is not consistent between style guides.
Is there an HTML entity?
One: †. Take care with the doubled form, whose name differs only in capitalisation.
Why does it appear as †in my text?
Its UTF-8 bytes are being read as Windows-1252. The trailing character in that sequence is a no-break space, which makes the fault easy to miss.