How to type Dagger
To type Dagger (†), press Alt + 0134 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + T on Mac, or write † in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+2020 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 2020 on Linux, or 2020 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Dagger
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+2020
- Windows
- Alt + 0134
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0134 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + T | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | † | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+2020 | DAGGER |
Other punctuation symbols
† lives in the General Punctuation block (U+2000-U+206F), dashes, quotation marks, spaces and reference marks used across languages. Within Unicode it is classified as Po, a punctuation mark.
What Dagger is used for
In mathematical notation † is a binary operator: it takes one operand on each side, and TeX sets a medium space either side of it so that the three parts read as a single expression rather than as three symbols in a row. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\dagger$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for † in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are dagger sign, obelisk and obelus. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Dagger is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.
What Unicode says about Dagger
The standard recognises † under another name as well: obelisk, long cross, oblong cross. That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
The code chart points from † to turned dagger (U+2E38). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Dagger looks nearly right but not quite.
How Dagger behaves in software
† is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
Every way to write Dagger
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+2020 |
| Decimal | 8224 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 80 A0 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 20 20 |
| HTML entity | † |
| HTML numeric | † or † |
| CSS | \2020 |
| JavaScript | \u2020 |
| Python | \u2020 |
| URL-encoded | %E2%80%A0 |
| LaTeX, in prose | \dag |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\dagger$ |
| SVG | 2020.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If † arrives as â€
One character has become three, which is what a three-byte UTF-8 sequence looks like when each byte is read separately: E2 80 A0 read as Windows-1252 gives exactly †. The text is intact and the damage is in the reading, so setting the reader to UTF-8 restores it and retyping does not. A rectangle instead of the mojibake means the opposite: the encoding is right and the font has no glyph at U+2020, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.