Solution: Division signs - NYT Crossword

This term is obscure to me; it may be that people well-versed in mathematics or more general academia hear it often. And it does appear in the puzzle now and then — sometimes clued as division symbols, other times as printer’s daggers, which are seen in footnotes and are vertical symbols of varying complexity. For that usage, OBELI go back to Homeric scholars, who used them to indicate a removal of spurious information or redundancy. (Asterisks were used to indicate the opposite, places where information needed to be added on the side; if this duo rings a bell, you might be thinking of the “Asterix and Obelix” graphic novels.) In various eras and places, OBELI indicate subtraction as well as division.