Pilcrow

This article is about the typographical mark. For the novel, see Pilcrow (novel).

"Paragraph mark" redirects here. For the symbol §, sometimes used as a paragraph mark, see Section sign.

Not to be confused with Paragraph separator.

In typography, the pilcrow (¶) is a glyph used to identify a paragraph. In editorial production the pilcrow typographic character is also known as the paragraph mark, the paragraph sign, the paragraph symbol, the paraph, and the blind P.^[1]

¶
Pilcrow
In Unicode	U+00B6 ¶ PILCROW SIGN (¶)
Different from
Different from	U+00A7 § SECTION SIGN
Related
See also	U+204B ⁋ REVERSED PILCROW SIGN U+2761 ❡ CURVED STEM PARAGRAPH SIGN ORNAMENT U+2E3F ⸿ CAPITULUM U+2E4D ⹍ PARAGRAPHUS MARK

Pilcrow in typefaces: Neue Helvetica, Arial, Consolas, Adobe Garamond Pro, Baskerville Old Face, Palatino Linotype, and Gentium Plus

In writing and editorial practice, authors and editors use the pilcrow glyph to indicate the start of separate paragraphs, and to identify a new paragraph within a long block of text without paragraph indentions, as in the book An Essay on Typography (1931), by Eric Gill.^[2] In the Middle Ages, the practice of rubrication (type in red-ink) used a red pilcrow to indicate the beginning of a different train of thought within the author's narrative without paragraphs.^[3]

The letterform of the pilcrow resembles a minuscule q or a mirrored majuscule P, with a usually-doubled backbone reaching from the descender to the ascender height. The bowl on the left side can be filled or empty, and occasionally extends far enough downward that the character resembles a mirrored D.

Origin and name

The English word pilcrow derives from the Ancient Greek: παράγραφος [parágraphos], "written in the side" or "written in the margin". In Old French, parágraphos became the word paragraphe and later pelagraphe. The earliest English language reference to the modern pilcrow is in 1440, with the Middle English word pylcrafte.^[4]

Use in Ancient Greek

Three short paragraphs on making gunpowder in the manuscript GNM 3227a (Germany, c. 1400); the first paragraph is marked with an early form of the pilcrow sign, the two following paragraphs are introduced with litterae notabiliores (enlarged letters).

Pilcrow signs in an excerpt from a page of Villanova, Rudimenta Grammaticæ, printed by Spindeler in 1500 in Valencia.^[5]

Possible development from capitulum to modern paragraph symbol.^[6]

The first way to divide sentences into groups in Ancient Greek was the original παράγραφος [parágraphos], which was a horizontal line in the margin to the left of the main text.^[7] As the paragraphos became more popular, the horizontal line eventually changed into the Greek letter Gamma (⟨Γ⟩, ⟨γ⟩) and later into litterae notabiliores, which were enlarged letters at the beginning of a paragraph.^[8]

Use in Latin

The above notation soon changed to the letter ⟨K⟩, an abbreviation for the Latin word caput, which translates as "head", i.e. it marks the head of a new thesis.^[9] Eventually, to mark a new section, the Latin word capitulum, which translates as "little head", was used, and the letter ⟨C⟩ came to mark a new section, or chapter,^[10] in 300 BC.^[11]

Use in Middle Ages

In the 1100s, ⟨C⟩ had completely replaced ⟨K⟩ as the symbol for a new chapter.^[6] Rubricators eventually added one or two vertical bars to the C to stylize it (as ⸿); the "bowl" of the symbol was filled in with dark ink and eventually looked like the modern pilcrow, ¶.^[6]

Scribes would often leave space before paragraphs to allow rubricators to add a hand-drawn pilcrow in contrasting ink. With the introduction of the printing press from the late medieval period on, space before paragraphs was still left for rubricators to complete by hand. If it was not practical to complete the rubrication, books might be sold with the spaces before the paragraphs left blank, thus creating the typographical practice of indentation.^[12])

Modern use

Opening page of Genesis from the Doves Bible (Doves Press, 1902): pilcrow used as a verse marker

The pilcrow remains in use in modern documents in the following ways:

• In legal writing, it is often used whenever one cites a specific paragraph within pleadings, law review articles, statutes, or other legal documents and materials. It is also used to indicate a paragraph break within quoted text.^[13]
• In academic writing, it is sometimes^{[citation needed]} used as an in-text referencing tool to make reference to a specific paragraph from a document that does not contain page numbers, allowing the reader to find where that particular idea or statistic was sourced. The pilcrow sign followed by a number indicates the paragraph number from the top of the page. It is rarely used when citing books or journal articles.
• In web publishing style guides, a pilcrow may be used to indicate an anchor link.^[14]
• In proofreading, it indicates an instruction that one paragraph should be split into two or more separate paragraphs. The proofreader inserts the pilcrow at the point where a new paragraph should begin.
• In some high-church Anglican and Episcopal churches, it is used in the printed order of service to indicate that instructions follow; these indicate when the congregation should stand, sit, and kneel, who participates in various portions of the service, and similar information. King's College, Cambridge uses this convention in the service booklet for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. This is analogous to the writing of these instructions in red in some rubrication conventions.

The pilcrow is also often used in word processing and desktop publishing software:

• As the toolbar icon used to toggle the display of formatting marks, such as tabs and paragraph breaks.^[15]
  • As the symbol for a paragraph break, shown when display is requested.

The pilcrow may indicate a footnote in a convention that uses a set of distinct typographic symbols in turn to distinguish between footnotes on a given page; it is the sixth in a series of footnote symbols beginning with the asterisk.^[1] (The modern convention is to use numbers or letters in superscript form.)

Encoding

The pilcrow character was encoded in the 1984 Multinational Character Set (Digital Equipment Corporation's extension to ASCII) at 0xB6 (decimal 182), subsequently adopted by ISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin-1", 1987) at the same code point, and thence by Unicode as U+00B6 ¶ PILCROW SIGN. In addition, Unicode also defines U+204B ⁋ REVERSED PILCROW SIGN, U+2761 ❡ CURVED STEM PARAGRAPH SIGN ORNAMENT, and U+2E3F ⸿ CAPITULUM. The capitulum character is obsolete, being replaced by pilcrow, but is included in Unicode for backward compatibility and historic studies.

The pilcrow symbol was included in the default hardware codepage 437 of IBM PCs (and all other 8-bit OEM codepages based on this) at code point 20 (0x14), which is an ASCII control character.

Keyboard entry

• Windows: Alt+0182 or Alt+20 (both on the numeric keypad)^[16]
  • Microsoft US international keyboard layout: AltGr+;
• Classic Mac OS and macOS: ⌥ Opt+7
• Linux and ChromeOS: Ctrl+⇧ Shift+UB6
  • Linux with compose key: Compose⇧ Shift+P⇧ Shift+P
  • ChromeOS with UK-International keyboard layout: AltGr+r
• HTML: ¶ (introduced in HTML 3.2 (1997)), or ¶
• Vim, in insert mode: Ctrl+K PI     (upper-case i, not a digit 1 or a lower-case letter L)
• TeX: \P
• LaTeX: \P or \textpilcrow
• Android phones (Gboard): ?123=/<¶
• Apple iPhones and iPads may require the user to set up a text replacement shortcut^[17] without installing custom keyboard software. Tools may be required to easily generate a pilcrow, or other special characters.^[18]

Paragraph signs in non-Latin writing systems

In Sanskrit and other Indian languages, text blocks are commonly written in stanzas. Two vertical bars, ॥, called a "double daṇḍa", are the functional equivalent of a pilcrow.^[19]

In Thai, the character ๏ marks the beginning of a stanza and ฯะ or ๚ะ marks the end of a stanza.^[20]

In Amharic, the characters ፠ and ፨ can mark a section/paragraph.

In China, the 〇, which has been used as a zero character since the 12th century, has been used to mark paragraphs in older Western-made books such as the Chinese Union Version of the Bible.