Reference Mark

Japanese calls this one 米印, komejirushi — the rice mark — because it looks like the kanji for rice, 米. That is a statement about the shape and nothing more. Where the mark actually came from is not something the sources will tell you, and the tidy origin stories in circulation are not well attested enough to repeat.

What makes it worth knowing is how differently it works from the Western marks it resembles. An asterisk sends you somewhere: to the foot of the page, the end of the chapter, a note living apart from the sentence that needed it. This mark sends you nowhere. The note goes inline, right there after the symbol, in the body text. It is less a footnote marker than a written version of "note that" or "please be aware" — a flag for a caveat, a condition, the small print a Western editor would exile downstairs.

Korean has the better name for it. Formally it is 참고표, the reference mark. Informally it is 당구장표: the billiard hall mark, because the symbol was once plastered across pool hall signage, and once someone tells you the glyph reads as two crossed cues and four balls, you will not be able to unsee it. Chinese, for its part, barely uses the character at all.