A pilcrow from the font Gentium, designed by J. Victor Gaultney, 2002.

Development from capitulum into modern paragraph symbol.

The pilcrow, paragraph sign, or alinea (from the Latin a linea, "of the line") (¶) is a typographical character commonly used to denote individual paragraphs. This non-alphabetic symbol varies from typeface to typeface, but the form shown here is typical. Image File history File links Paragraph-(capitulum). ... Image File history File links Paragraph-(capitulum). ... A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in a written text dealing with a particular point or idea, or the the words of a speaker. ... In typography, a typeface consists of a co-ordinated set of grapheme (i. ...

The pilcrow 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 the Middle Ages to mark a new train of thought, before the convention of physically discrete paragraphs was commonplace. Arthur Eric Rowton Gill (February 22, 1882–November 17, 1940) was a British sculptor, typographer and engraver. ... The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times, beginning with the Renaissance. ...

The pilcrow is drawn like a backwards letter P reaching to caps height or ascender height, but may also be drawn with the bowl stretching further downwards, resembling a backwards D. The letter D is the fourth letter of the Latin alphabet. ...

History & terminology

The name may be a derivation of paragraph through parcrafte, but this etymology is uncertain. The OED suggests that the word originated as pylcraft, a corrupted form of "paragraph" (earliest reference c.1440). Cover of the Pocket version of the Oxford English Dictionary The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP). ...

According to M.B. Parkes in Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (ISBN 0520079418), the pilcrow originated as a C, for capitulum (= "chapter"). Parkes states that the pilcrow is a symbol for a paraph which replaced the paragraphos, which was marked using different symbols, including the section sign. The paraph could also be marked with a full-height cent-like sign or a double slash, originally left as a note from the scribe to the rubricator. An inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers on a branch of a plant. ... Variants of paragraphos. ... The section sign (§; Unicode U+00A7, HTML entity §) is a typographical character used mainly to refer to a particular section of a document, such as a legal code. ... A solidus, oblique or slash, /, is a punctuation mark. ... Illustration of a 15th century scribe This is about scribe, the profession. ... Detail from a rare Blackletter Bible (1497) printed and rubricated in Strassburg by J.R.Grueninger. ...

Contemporary use

The pilcrow has been used in desktop publishing software such as word processors and page layout programs as the carriage return control character to mark the end of a paragraph. It is also used as the icon on a class of toolbar button which shows or hides the pilcrow and similar "hidden characters", including tabs, whitespace, and page breaks. A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ... Desktop publishing, or DTP, is the process of editing and layout of printed material intended for publication, such as books, magazines, brochures, and the like using a personal computer. ... In computing, a control character or non-printing character, is a code point (a number) in a character set that does not, in itself, represent a written symbol. ... Mac OS X Panther allows continuous scaling of icons up to 128x128 pixels A computer icon is a small pictogram, usually ranging from 16 by 16 pixels up to 128 by 128 pixels, which represents a file, folder, application or device on a computer operating system. ... An early toolbar on a Xerox Alto Computer In a graphical user interface on a computer monitor a toolbar is a row, column, or block of onscreen buttons or icons that, when clicked, activate certain functions of the program. ... The tab key on a modern Windows keyboard The tab key on a keyboard is used to advance the cursor to the next tab stop. // Typewriters When a typist wanted to type a table, there was a lot of time-consuming and repetitive use of the space bar and backspace... For information on the programming language, see Whitespace programming language. ...

In Unicode, the pilcrow sign codepoint is U+00B6. The HTML entity for it is ¶. Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... HTML has been in use since 1991, but the first standardized version with a reasonably complete treatment of international characters was version 4. ...

Paragraph signs in foreign languages

In Chinese, the traditional paragraph sign is a thin sans serif circle about the same size as a Chinese character. This same mark also serves as a “zero” character, as a stylistic variation of the Chinese character for “zero”. As a paragraph sign, this mark only appears in older books. its current use is generally as a “zero” character. In typography, a sans-serif or sans serif typeface is one that does not have the small features called serifs at the end of strokes. ... Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...

See also

• Section sign
• Paragraphos