what does this symbol mean?

Writing and text symbols

Punctuation, typographic marks and emoticons: what each one is called, what it means and how it is used.

Writing and text symbols are the marks people write and type besides letters and numbers. There are two collections here. Punctuation and typographic symbols has nineteen pages: the dashes, the reference marks of footnotes and legal citations, the copyright and trademark signs, and keyboard characters that computing gave new jobs. Emoticons has three faces made out of those same characters: the shrug, the heart and the happy eyes. Each page says what the mark is called and what it means, and where dictionaries, style guides or standards disagree, it says which says what.

Punctuation and typographic symbols 19 symbols

Dashes, the ampersand, the section and paragraph signs, the copyright and trademark marks and the other symbols of type, what each is called and how it is used.

Emoticons 3 symbols

Faces and signs typed with ordinary characters, such as the shrug and the heart, what each stands for and where it came from.

Names from the print shop

Many of the names are printers’ words. Em and en, as in the em dash and the en dash, are units of type measurement, Matthew Butterick writes in Practical Typography. The interrobang joins interrogation with bang, printers’ slang for the exclamation mark, and pilcrow comes from the Old French paragrafe, by way of the Middle English pilcraft (American Heritage Dictionary). Ampersand is “and per se and” run together, and octothorpe, another name for #, was coined in the 1960s by researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories, the same dictionary says.

New jobs in computing

Ray Tomlinson picked the at sign for email in 1971 because it wasn’t commonly used in computing then (NPR). Pipes, written with the vertical bar, appeared in Unix in 1972 at Doug McIlroy’s suggestion, Dennis Ritchie recalled, and Chris Messina first suggested the hashtag on Twitter on 23 August 2007. Emoticons began on a computer message board too. Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the first substantiated one to Scott E. Fahlman, who suggested :-) for humorous posts on 19 September 1982.

Same mark, different readings

Style guides do not agree on dashes. Chicago sets the em dash with no space on either side, the AP Stylebook puts a space on each side, and the Guardian uses en dashes instead. Emoticons differ by place: Jaram Park and colleagues, studying 1.1 billion tweets, found Western users favouring sideways faces such as :-), and users in eastern countries upright ones such as ^^, which put the emotion in the eyes.

Sources

  1. Hyphens and dashes, Matthew Butterick, Butterick’s Practical Typography, Matthew Butterick, Hyphens and dashes
  2. interrobang (American Heritage Dictionary entry), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition, HarperCollins Publishers, interrobang, n.
  3. pilcrow (American Heritage Dictionary entry), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition, HarperCollins Publishers, pilcrow, n.
  4. ampersand (American Heritage Dictionary entry), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition, HarperCollins Publishers, ampersand, n.
  5. octothorpe (American Heritage Dictionary entry), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition, HarperCollins Publishers, octothorpe, n.
  6. number sign (American Heritage Dictionary entry), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition, HarperCollins Publishers, number sign, n.
  7. In Memoriam: Ray Tomlinson, Who Put The @ Sign In Your Email, All Tech Considered, 7 March 2016 (from a 2009 interview with Guy Raz), NPR, Article text
  8. The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System, Dennis M. Ritchie (1979; web edition), Nokia Bell Labs, Pipes
  9. #OriginStory, Carnegie Mellon University homepage story, summer 2014, Carnegie Mellon University, Story text
  10. emoticon, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction
  11. Hyphens and Dashes: A Refresher, CMOS Shop Talk, 23 January 2024, updated 15 April 2025, The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press), Some Definitions; 2-em and 3-em Dashes; Minus Signs
  12. The em dash: A valid punctuation mark – or artificial intelligence easy tell?, Anna Jo Bratton, AP Stylebook blog, 27 August 2025, The Associated Press, blog post
  13. Guardian and Observer style guide: D, Guardian and Observer style guide, Guardian News & Media, dashes
  14. Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures, Jaram Park, Vladimir Barash, Clay Fink and Meeyoung Cha, Proceedings of ICWSM 7 (2013), 466–475, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Introduction; Table 2; Results

Last reviewed October 1, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research