Handwritten notice in Japanese-komejirushi at the bottom of each page

The reference mark or reference symbol "※" is a typographic mark or word used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) writing. The symbol was used historically to call attention to an important sentence or idea, such as a prologue or footnote. As an indicator of a note, the mark serves the same purpose as the

asterisk The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , , "little star", is a Typography, typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star (heraldry), heraldic star. Computer scientists and Mathematici ...

in English. However, in Japanese usage, the note text is placed directly into the main text immediately after the reference mark, rather than at the bottom of the page or end of chapter as is the case in English writing.

Names

The Japanese name, (; , , ), refers to the symbol's visual similarity to the for "rice" (). In Korean, the symbol's name, (), simply means "reference mark". Informally, the symbol is often called (; ), as it is often used to indicate the presence of pool halls, due to its visual similarity to two crossed cue sticks and four billiard balls. In Chinese, the symbol is called () or ( due to its visual similarity to "rice"). It is not often used in Chinese writing.

Unicode

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, the symbol has code point .

References

{{navbox punctuation Symbols Japanese writing system Korean writing system

Names

Unicode

See also

References