Pilcrow

The pilcrow (¶) is commonly called the paragraph sign. This non-alphabetic symbol varies from typeface to typeface, but the form shown here is probably fairly typical.

The symbol can be used as an indent for separate paragraphs, or to designate a new paragraph in one long piece of copy, as Eric Gill did in his 1930s book, An Essay On Typography. The pilcrow was used in medieval times to mark a new train of thought, before the convention of using paragraphs was commonplace.

The pilcrow is commonly drawn like a backwards letter P with an extra full-height stem, but may also be drawn with the round area stretching further downwards, more like a backwards D.

The name may have originated in the perversion of the word paragraph through parcrafte, but this is uncertain. The OED suggests that it originated as pylcraft, a corrupted form of "paragraph" around 1460. According to M.B. Parkes in Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West, it originated as a C, for capitulum. Parkes states that it is a symbol for a paraph, which superseded the paragraphus which was marked in various ways, including a section symbol. The paraph can also be marked with a full-height cent-like sign or a double slash, which was originally left as a note from the scribe to the rubricator.

More recently, it has been used in word processors (including the widely used Microsoft Word) to represent the control character that marks the end of a paragraph. It is often also used as the icon on a toolbar button which shows or hides these and similar "hidden characters", including whitespace and page breaks.

In Unicode, the pilcrow sign codepoint is U+00B6. The HTML entity reference for it is ¶.

See also