Pilcrow (¶)

How to read it

Unicode encodes it as U+00B6 PILCROW SIGN, alias “paragraph sign”. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the paragraph mark as one “used to indicate where a new paragraph should begin”, or a reference mark. Butterick’s Practical Typography says it is used when citing documents with sequentially numbered paragraphs and is doubled (¶¶) for more than one. The word pilcrow is a worn-down form of paragraph: the American Heritage Dictionary and the Online Etymology Dictionary trace it through Middle English pilcraft to Old French paragrafe, and the Online Etymology Dictionary dates pilcrow to the 1570s, its spelling influenced by crow.

Also searched as: ¶, paragraph mark, paragraph symbol, pilcrow meaning, pilcrow symbol.

Where you’ll see it

In legal citations, where ¶ 49 refers to a numbered paragraph. In online documentation as a link marker: the Python Language Reference puts a ¶ after each heading, as in “6.7. Binary arithmetic operations ¶”. Butterick calls the older habit of using pilcrows inside a solid block of text to mark paragraphs archaic.

Look-alikes

The reversed pilcrow ⁋ (U+204B) faces the other way, and the curved stem paragraph sign ornament ❡ (U+2761) is a decorative version. The section sign § marks a section rather than a paragraph, though Unicode notes that in some European usage the pilcrow is the section sign.