Pilcrow Sign
On Windows, hold Alt and type 0182 on the numeric keypad to insert pilcrow sign.
- Alt code
- Alt+0182
- HTML entity
- ¶
- Unicode
- U+00B6
About this symbol
The pilcrow marks the start of a paragraph. Medieval scribes wrote a C for capitulum, meaning chapter, added upright strokes, and over centuries it grew into the shape used today. Specialist scribes called rubricators often painted it in red ink into spaces left for them.
A popular theory holds that when printing arrived, those spaces were often left empty, which gave us the indented first line of a paragraph. Word processors still use the pilcrow to show hidden paragraph breaks. The name is a corruption of “paragraph”, by way of the Old French pelagraphe.
Unicode facts
- Official name
- PILCROW SIGN
- Also called
- Paragraph sign
- Type
- Punctuation
- Unicode block
- Latin-1 Supplement
- Unicode group
- Latin-1 punctuation and symbols
- Added in
- Unicode 1.1 (1993)
- Unicode notes
- Section sign in some European usage
Click the symbol or any value at the top of the page to copy it. See the full Windows Extended Codes: 0128 to 0255 chart for related characters.