Note (typography)

A note is a string of text placed at the bottom of a page in a book or document or at the end of a chapter, volume or the whole text. The note can provide an author's comments on the main text or citations of a reference work in support of the text, or both. In English, a footnote is normally flagged by a superscripted number immediately following that portion of the text the note is in reference to, each such footnote being numbered sequentially.

Occasionally a number between brackets or parentheses is used instead, thus: [1]. Typographical devices such as the asterisk (*) or dagger (†) may also be used to point to footnotes; the traditional order of these symbols in English is *, †, ‡, §, ‖, ¶. Historically, ☞ was also at the end of this list. In documents like timetables, many different symbols, as well as letters and numbers, may be used to refer the reader to particular notes. In John Bach McMaster's multi-volume History of the People of the United States the sequence runs *, †, ‡, # (instead of §), ‖, Δ (instead of ¶), ◊, ↓, ↕, ↑. In Arabic texts, a specific Arabic footnote marker (؂), encoded as U+0602 in Unicode, is also used. In Japanese, the corresponding symbol is ※ (U+203B).