Pilcrow

The pilcrow is the glyph at U+00B6, a P turned into a marker: the bowl filled in, the stem doubled, the whole thing usually drawn heavier than the text around it. Its oldest job is the one its shape still says out loud. Medieval manuscripts ran as unbroken blocks of text, and a rubricator went through afterwards in red ink marking where each new argument started. The mark was a capital C for capitulum, a little chapter, which drifted over centuries of copying into the shape we have now. The name travelled the same road, from paragraphos through Old French to pylcrafte and then pilcrow. Scribes left a gap in the text for the rubricator to fill, and when the red ink stopped arriving the gap stayed behind: that abandoned space is where the paragraph indent comes from.

That history is the reason the pilcrow and the indent are alternatives rather than partners. Both mark the same event, the start of a new paragraph, and both come from the same red mark; the indent is literally the hole the mark used to sit in. Setting a paragraph with a first line indent and a visible pilcrow says the same thing twice, which is why continuous prose with pilcrows in it, the way a legal citation or a Bible sets verses run together, drops the indent entirely and lets the mark do all the work.

Interfaces use it in two other ways. Word processors and editors show it as a formatting mark: turn marks on and a pilcrow appears at every paragraph break, a dot in every space, an arrow at every tab, so a writer can see the structure the characters have rather than the shape they happen to make. It is the fastest way to answer “why will this line not move”, and the marks are drawn without moving the text they annotate, which is what the specimen on this page reproduces. The second use is the web’s: a pilcrow that appears beside a heading on hover, linking to that section. It reads as the paragraph symbol, but strictly it is an anchor pointing at the block, which is why the section sign (U+00A7) and a plain link icon turn up in the same slot on other sites.

Say the name out loud when you mean the character, because the alternatives are all worse. “Paragraph symbol” gets confused with the indent, “reverse P” describes half of it, and the thing has been called a paraph, a blind P, and an alinea depending on who is speaking. In a design system the pilcrow is normally an icon rather than a typed character anyway, since it has to hold its weight at 12 pixels beside a heading, and the letterform in most text faces does not.