In typography, the pilcrow (ö) is a grapheme used to identify a paragraph. In editorial production the pilcrow typographic character is also 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 grapheme 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 letterform of the pilcrow resembles a minuscule or a mirrored majuscule , with a usually-doubled backbone reaching from the descender to the ascender height. The bowl on the left side can be filled or empty, and occasionally extends far enough downward that the character resembles a mirrored . The backbone is usually straight, but in some fonts curves toward the bowl.
The English word pilcrow derives from the [], "written in the side" or "written in the margin". In Old French, parágraphos became the word and later . The earliest English language reference to the modern pilcrow is in 1440, with the Middle English word .
The first way to divide sentences into groups in Ancient Greek was the original [], which was a horizontal line in the margin to the left of the main text. As the became more popular, the horizontal line eventually changed into the Greek letter gamma (, ) and later into , which were enlarged letters at the beginning of a paragraph.
The above notation soon changed to the letter , an abbreviation for the Latin word , which translates as "head", i.e. it marks the head of a new thesis. Eventually, to mark a new section, the Latin word , which translates as "little head", was used, and the letter came to mark a new section, or chapter, in 300 BC.
In the 1100s, had completely replaced as the symbol for a new chapter. Rubricators eventually added one or two vertical bars to the to stylize it (as <big></big>); the "bowl" of the symbol was filled in with dark ink and eventually looked like the modern pilcrow, <big></big>.
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. If it was not practical to complete the rubrication, books might be sold with the spaces before the paragraphs left blank, thus creating the typographical practice of indentation.
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.)
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.
In Sanskrit and other Indian languages, text blocks are commonly written in stanzas. Two vertical bars, , called a double daá¹Âá¸Âa, are the functional equivalent of a pilcrow.
In Thai, the character fongman () marks the beginning of a stanza and paiyannoi sara a () or angkhankhu sara a () marks the end of a stanza.
In Amharic, the characters 'Ethiopic section mark' () and 'Ethiopic paragraph separator' () can mark a section or paragraph, respectively.
In China, the ideograpic number zero (), 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.