Got Pilcrow? ¶

The Forest Gump of Glyphs You Didn't Know You Know so Well

¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶

Got pilcrow?

AKA, who's down for famous enduring glyphs of history, religion, and code?

The pilcrow (¶), also known as the paragraph mark, is widely used but rarely talked about.

It has a rich life throughout all of history dating back to ancient. paragraph symbol, the paraph,the blind P (my favorite!).

The pilcrow's origins trace back to around 200 AD.

Its evolution and usage in both writing and coding is vast. Scribes had used various marks to indicate changes in topics within either text blocks or paragraphs (ha) or pages -- yet these were inconsistent in application.

¶ Greek : The first way to divide sentences into groups in Ancient Greek was the original παράγραφος [parágraphos], which was a horizontal line in the margin to the left of the main text. As the paragraphos became more popular, the horizontal line eventually changed into the Greek letter Gamma (⟨Γ⟩, ⟨γ⟩) and later into litterae notabiliores, which were enlarged letters at the beginning of a paragraph.

“litterae notabiliores”

¶ Latin : The above notation soon changed to the letter ⟨K⟩, an abbreviation for the Latin word caput, which translates as "head", i.e. it marks the head of a new thesis. Eventually, to mark a new section, the Latin word capitulum, which translates as "little head", was used, and the letter ⟨C⟩ came to mark a new section, or chapter, [10] in 300 BC.

¶ Religion : Was used widely and ornately in religious manuscripts like the Bible.

Also in lectionaries including Anglican and Episcopal to indicate instructions for the congregation. The Middle AgesIn the 1100s, ⟨C⟩ had completely replaced ⟨K⟩ as the symbol for a new chapter.

Rubricators eventually added one or two vertical bars to the C to stylize it (as ⸿); the "bowl" of the symbol was filled in with dark ink and eventually looked like the modern pilcrow, ¶.

Specialized rubricators would add ornate pilcrows in red ink to manuscripts.

¶ Printing press : When printing pressing came, he pilcrow transitioned into standard typography. Printers adopted it to indicate new paragraphs, enhancing readability.

¶ Law : In legal writing, it is used whenever one cites a specific paragraph within pleadings, law review articles, statutes, or other legal documents and materials. It is also used to indicate a paragraph break within quoted text. The pilcrow sign followed by a number indicates the paragraph number and/or page.

¶ Modern publishing : Today, editors use the pilcrow to mark new paragraphs in manuscripts, and

¶ Academics : This in-text referencing tool is utilized to make reference to a specific paragraph from a document that does not contain page numbers, allowing the reader to find where that particular idea or statistic was sourced.

¶ Code : The pilcrow is available in various operating systems and software; inserted using Alt+0182 on Windows, Opt+7 on Mac). 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 U+00B6 ¶ PILCROW SIGN.

It’s right there in your MS Word in hidden formatting.

In addition, Unicode also defines U+204B ⁋ REVERSED PILCROW SIGN, U+2761 ❡ CURVED STEM PARAGRAPH SIGN ORNAMENT, and U+2E3F ⸿ CAPITULUM. The capitulum character is long obsolete, being replaced by pilcrow, but is included in Unicode for backward compatibility and historic studies.

The pilcrow's journey from ancient manuscripts to modern digital environments shows it to be famous but unknown.

Its the Forest Gump of characters/glyphs.

TODAY from Anciens and Institutional in Law and Legal Filings it is now a player in our Codebases.

And, I predict a continuing bright future for the PILCROW! Hug your pilcrow today.

#pilcrow