Manicule

Not to be confused with manacle or manicure.

The manicule, ☛, is a typographic mark with the appearance of a hand with its index finger extending in a pointing gesture. Originally used for handwritten marginal notes, it later came to be used in printed works to draw the reader's attention to important text. Though once widespread, it is rarely used today, except as an occasional archaic novelty or on informal directional signs.^[1]

☚ ☞ ☟
Manicule
In Unicode	U+261A ☚ BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX[a]

Terminology

A manicule from the "Specimen Book of the Cincinnati Type Foundry" (1882)

For most of its history, the mark has been inconsistently referred to by a variety of names. William H. Sherman, in the first dedicated study of the mark, uses the term manicule (from the Latin root manicula, meaning "little hand"), but also identifies 14^[b] further names which he records as having been used:^[2]

• hand
• pointing hand
• hand director
• pointer
• digit
• fist
• mutton fist
• bishop's fist
• index
• indicationum
• indicator
• indicule^[c]
• maniple^[d]
• pilcrow^[e]

Sherman calls the last three terms erroneous: indicule and maniple as mishearings or conflations, and pilcrow properly refers to the paragraph mark, ¶.^[2]

History

Handwritten manicules

Manicule from the fifteenth century

The symbol began as a form of marginalia that developed alongside books in their now-standard codex form.^[3] One of the earliest forms of marginal commentary was scholia, or written notes in the margins of text, typically provided by the scribe who created the handwritten manuscript copy.^[4] Three ancient Greek homeric scholars—Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus of Samothrace—who were all librarians at the Library of Alexandria, successively developed a system of symbols to be used in the margins of Homer's poetry. Named after the obelus, which evolved into the modern dagger †, this system of marking up a text with a set of symbols for scholarly commentary became known as obelism.^[5] Among these Aristarchian symbols, the ancora, an anchor-shaped pointer ⸔ or ⸕, was used to draw attention to a passage.^[6]

The codex format for texts, introduced in the 4th century AD, was better suited to marginal notation than the continuous scrolls used in antiquity. While the pages on a scroll are written on the same long length of papyrus or parchment, a codex has physically separate pages bound at one edge. Their format is very similar to a modern book, although using vellum or parchment made from animal hides instead of paper.^[7]

In Europe, note-taking by readers and the related usage of the manicule peaked in the Renaissance.^[7] It is difficult to say when the manicule first appeared because its usage was heavily tied to the act of reading. Renaissance owners of expensive manuscript and of early printed books often extensively annotated the books they owned.^[7] Many manuscripts and printed books from the period contain personal systems of marginal symbols and notes written by the book's reader, and some even have hand-written legends for the symbols and entire indices appended to the book.^[8]

Johnson (1824)

Domesday (1086)

According to John Johnson's Typographia, Or The Printers' Instructor (1824), the manicule was one of many self-explanatory marginal symbols appearing in Domesday Book, completed in 1086.

The oldest book known to contain a manicule is the 1086 land survey, Domesday Book, but the age of the annotation is unknown and may date to later than the 11th century.^[9] Domesday Book uses a range of symbols for marginal annotations including the manicule and other marks such as daggers.^[9] Though the manicule was frequently used for centuries to annotate books by both copyists and readers, there was little written about the mark itself. Printer John Johnson's 1824 guide and history on typography, Typographia, Or The Printers' Instructor, lays out the book's various reference marks including the dagger, manicule, and asterisk as reference symbols that "in most instances explain themselves."^[7]

Manicules appeared in 12th century handwritten manuscripts in Spain,^[10] and became common in 14th and 15th centuries Italian manuscript. Some were as simple as "two squiggly strokes suggesting the barest sketch of a pointing hand" and thus quick to draw, while others were playful and elaborate, with shading and artful cuffs.^[11] Some have fingers lengthened and bent to point deep into the text. For example, a fourteenth-century manuscript of Cicero's Paradoxa Stoicorum includes manicules that variously stretch out fingernails, bend their fingers to cover the full length of the page, are an octupus, or wield a snake.^[12][13]

• Variety of manicules from a 14th century manuscript
• 
  Nail
  (p. 1)
• 
  Tentacles
  (p. 2)
• 
  Fingers
  (p. 3)
• 
  Snake
  (p. 4)

After the popularization of the printing press starting in the 1450s, the handwritten version continued in handwritten form as a means to annotate printed documents, eventually falling out of popularity by the nineteenth century.^[1]

In print

Pointing hands used in the signage outside the bar Cheers in Boston, part of a Victorian decorative theme

Two manicules drawn by Eric Gill

Signpost with pointing hand in a caricature published in 1773

Early printers using a type representing the manicule included Mathias Huss and Johannes Schabeler in Lyons in their 1484 edition of Paulus Florentinus's Breviarum totius juris canonici.^[10] Writer John Boardley identifies the first appearance of a manicule in a printed book as an earlier 1479 edition of the same work, Breviarum totius juris canonici, printed in Milan by Leonhard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeller.^[14]

In contrast with their handwritten use, early printed manicules appeared in the main text, pointing outward toward corresponding printed margin notes. From the sixteenth century onward,^[15] the manicule appeared frequently as a decorative element on the title pages of books, alongside other so-called "dingbats" such as the fleuron (❦).^[1]

The manicule attained a great degree of popularity in the nineteenth century, particularly in advertisements. At this time, they also became more visually diverse, with larger and more complex fists being created.^[1] They were also widely used in signage, with some fingerposts having relief-printed or even fully three-dimensional physical manifestations of pointing hands.^[16] The United States Postal Service has also used a pointing hand as a graphical indicator for its "Return to Sender" stamp.^[17]

Its popularity declined toward the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps due to its oversaturation in advertising. By the 1890s, it was rarely used unless for ironic effect.^[1] Sherman (2005) argues that as the symbols became standardized, they were no longer reflective of individuality in comparison to other writing, and this explains their diminished popularity.^[18]

Usage examples

1865 wanted poster of John Wilkes Booth using index-fist character.

The typical use of the pointing hand is as a bullet-like symbol to direct the reader's attention to important text, having roughly the same meaning as the word "attention" or "note". It is used this way both by annotators and printers. Even in the first few centuries of use, it can be seen used to draw attention to specific text, such as a title (in some cases in the form of a row of manicules), inserted text, noteworthy passage, or sententiae. In some cases, flower marks and asterisks were used for similar purposes. Less commonly, in earlier centuries the pointing hand acted as a section divider with a pilcrow as paragraph divider; or more rarely as the paragraph divider itself.^[19]

Some encyclopedias use it in articles to cross-reference, as in ☞ other articles. It occasionally sees use in magazines and comic books to indicate to the reader that a story on the right-hand page continues onto the next.^[20]

In modern printing, it was used as a standard typographical symbol marking notes. The American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking (1894) treats it as the seventh in the standard sequence of footnote markers, following the paragraph sign (pilcrow).^[21]

In linguistics, the symbol is used in optimality theory tableaux to identify the optimal output in a candidate of generated possibilities from a given input.^[22]

The computer programming language Smalltalk-72 uses a number of special characters, including a right-pointing manicule used as a quotation mark.^[23]

The Lincoln Writer terminals designed around 1958 for the MIT Lincoln Laboratory's TX-2 computer used a character set which included a right-pointing manicule;^[24] this was nicknamed the "Meta Hand".^[25] In 1959 the same character set was also installed in a Flexowriter intended for use with the TX-0 computer.^[26]

Computer cursor

A similar pointing hand icon is used as a mouse cursor in many graphical user interfaces (such as those in Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop) to indicate an object that can be manipulated. The earliest known software release to use this cursor was Alan Kay's Smalltalk for the Xerox workstations. Those computers, like the Xerox Star, influenced the graphical user interface of Apple's Lisa and Macintosh desktop computers.^[16] Apple themselves used a hand cursor to indicate a clickable hyperlink in their 1987 Hypercard software, a local hypertext framework developed by Bill Atkinson.^[27] At Apple, graphic designer Susan Kare created a "clicker" icon similar to a manicule that influenced later cursors for hypertext as well as video games.^[28][29] It became the standard way to represent links when it was adopted by the early web browsers in the 1990s.^[30] Experimental author Shelley Jackson observed that while visually similar to a manicule, the often-gloved hand cursor serves not as a textual signpost but as an invitation to make users feel "encouraged by the image of the hand to feel that they were interacting directly, physically with the image on the screen."^[28]

Unicode

Unicode (version 1.0, 1991) introduced six "pointing index" characters in the Miscellaneous Symbols block:

• U+261A ☚ BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX
• U+261B ☛ BLACK RIGHT POINTING INDEX
• U+261C ☜ WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX
• U+261D ☝ WHITE UP POINTING INDEX
• U+261E ☞ WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
• U+261F ☟ WHITE DOWN POINTING INDEX

Unicode 6.0 (2010) included four more pointing hands in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs:

• U+1F446 👆 WHITE UP POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
• U+1F447 👇 WHITE DOWN POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
• U+1F448 👈 WHITE LEFT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
• U+1F449 👉 WHITE RIGHT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX

Unicode 7.0 (2014) added several more indices to the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block, sourced from the Wingdings 2 font:

• U+1F597 🖗 WHITE DOWN POINTING LEFT HAND INDEX
• U+1F598 🖘 SIDEWAYS WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX
• U+1F599 🖙 SIDEWAYS WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
• U+1F59A 🖚 SIDEWAYS BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX
• U+1F59B 🖛 SIDEWAYS BLACK RIGHT POINTING INDEX
• U+1F59C 🖜 BLACK LEFT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
• U+1F59D 🖝 BLACK RIGHT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
• U+1F59E 🖞 SIDEWAYS WHITE UP POINTING INDEX
• U+1F59F 🖟 SIDEWAYS WHITE DOWN POINTING INDEX
• U+1F5A0 🖠 SIDEWAYS BLACK UP POINTING INDEX
• U+1F5A1 🖡 SIDEWAYS BLACK DOWN POINTING INDEX
• U+1F5A2 🖢 BLACK UP POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
• U+1F5A3 🖣 BLACK DOWN POINTING BACKHAND INDEX

Unicode 13.0 (2020) added a three-part index (🯁🯂🯃) in the Symbols for Legacy Computing block:

• U+1FBC1 🯁 LEFT THIRD WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
• U+1FBC2 🯂 MIDDLE THIRD WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
• U+1FBC3 🯃 RIGHT THIRD WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX

Emoji

Five Unicode manicule characters are emoji, including one of those in Unicode 1.0 and all four introduced in Unicode 6.0.^[31][32] All five have standardized variants for text and emoji presentation.^[33]

Emoji variation sequences

U+	261D	1F446	1F447	1F448	1F449
default presentation	text	emoji	emoji	emoji	emoji
base code point	☝	👆	👇	👈	👉
base+VS15 (text)	☝︎	👆︎	👇︎	👈︎	👉︎
base+VS16 (emoji)	☝️	👆️	👇️	👈️	👉️

See also

• Arrow (symbol)
• V sign
• Obelus (historic text pointer)
• Hand (hieroglyph) – Egyptian hieroglyph

Notes

1. Although the canonical name is Black left pointing index, Unicode uses the word 'black' to mean 'solid' and 'white' to mean 'outlined'. The actual colour is a user choice, for example ☚ and ☞.
2. Sherman mentions finding "15 other names", but lists only 14.
3. from Latin: indiculus, a catalogue index.
4. an item of liturgical clothing worn over the left arm
5. The paragraph mark, ¶