In typography, the pilcrow (¶) is a glyph used to identify a paragraph. In editorial production the pilcrow typographic character may also be known as the paragraph mark, the paragraph sign, the paragraph symbol, the paraph, and the blind P. 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. 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. The typographic character of the pilcrow usually is drawn like a lowercase letter-q, reaching from the descender to the ascender height; the bowl (loop) can be filled or empty. Moreover, the pilcrow can also be drawn with the bowl extended downward, to resemble a reversed letter-D.

Origin and name

The English word pilcrow derives from the [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.

Use in Ancient Greek

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. 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.

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. 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, in 300 BC.

Use in Middle Ages

In the 1100s, ⟨C⟩ had completely replaced ⟨K⟩ as the symbol for a new chapter. 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, ¶. (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. However in some circumstances, rubricators could not draw fast enough for publishers' deadlines and books would often be sold with the beginnings of the paragraphs left blank. This is how the practice of indention before paragraphs was created. )

Modern use

The pilcrow remains in use in modern documents in the following ways: The pilcrow is also often used in word processing and desktop publishing software: 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. (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. In addition, Unicode also defines, , and. 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

Paragraph signs in non-Latin writing systems

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