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Obelism is the practice of annotatingmanuscripts with marks set in the margins. Modern obelisms are used by editors whenproofreading a manuscript or typescript. Examples are "stet" (which is Latin for "Let it stand", used in this context to mean "disregard the previous mark") and "dele" (for "Delete").
Theobelos symbol (seeobelus) gets its name from the spit, or sharp end of alance inancient Greek. An obelos was placed by editors on the margins of manuscripts, especially inHomer, to indicate lines that may not have been written by Homer. The system was developed byAristarchus and notably used later byOrigen in hisHexapla. Origen marked spurious words with an opening obelus and a closing metobelos ("end of obelus").[1]
There were many other suchshorthand symbols, to indicate corrections, emendations, deletions, additions, and so on. Most used are the editorialcoronis, theparagraphos, the forked paragraphos, the reversed forked paragraphos, thehypodiastole, thedownwards ancora, theupwards ancora, and thedotted right-pointing angle, which is also known as thediple periestigmene. Loosely, all these symbols, and the act of annotation by means of them, areobelism.
These nine ancient Greek textual annotation symbols are also included in the supplemental punctuation list ofISO/IEC 10646 standard for character sets.
Unicode encodes the following:
Some of these were also used inAncient Greek punctuation asword dividers.[2] The two-dot punctuation is used as a word separator inOld Turkic script.
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