Tuesday, December 3, 2013

pilcrow

pilcrow \PIL-kroh\, noun:

a paragraph mark.

Take the trouble to look it up and in most cases the humble pilcrow warrants only a few lines, dismissed briskly as a "paragraph mark" that is "only important when brevity is important."
-- Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks, 2013
I'm more like a specialized piece of punctuation, a cedilla, umlaut or pilcrow, hard to track down on the keyboard of a computer or typewriter.
-- Adam Mars-Jones, Pilcrow, 2008

Pilcrow arose in the 1400s, possibly from the Old French paragrafe meaning "paragraph."

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