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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

Paragraph signs in foreign languages

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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.

See also

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• Section sign
• Paragraphos

Typography | Punctuation

Afsnitstegn | Absatzzeichen | Pied de mouche | Piede di mosca