Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The symbol (¶).
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The character ¶, used to mark the beginning of a new paragraph: same as
paragraph , 4.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Print.), obsolete a paragraph mark, ¶.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The paragraph mark
¶ .
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Who knew, for example, that the backward P printer's mark that denotes a paragraph break is called a pilcrow or that the only letters formed in a clockwise direction are m, n, h, k, b, p and r?
NPR Topics: News 2011
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Who knew, for example, that the backward P printer's mark that denotes a paragraph break is called a pilcrow or that the only letters formed in a clockwise direction are m, n, h, k, b, p and r?
NPR Topics: News 2011
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nyokki: what i did is google the word pilcrow and i saw the symbol and copied it instead of going in character map. hope it makes it easier for you
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There used to be a clunky paragraph sign known as a pilcrow ; initially it was a C with a slash drawn through it.
Is This the Future of Punctuation Henry Hitchings 2011
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There is also a deep look at the @ symbol's new-found stardom, the octothorpe enjoying a new lease of life renamed as the "hashtag" in Twitter parlance, and the secretive pilcrow.
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I'll start with remarks on little known formal names for some punctuation marks. pilcrow: ¶
Archive 2008-05-01 2008
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MS Word wants to make anything that looks like a quote mark with a space, tab, or pilcrow in front of it into some kind of open-quote mark.
Archive 2008-05-01 2008
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Other terms do it for me too: recently I was reminded by India that the symbol for a paragraph is called a pilcrow.
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The third type has a pilcrow ¶ but no paragraph break.
A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes Richard Sherry
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In this e-text, the second type of paragraph is marked with a pilcrow ¶.
A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes Richard Sherry
reesetee commented on the word pilcrow
Also called the paragraph sign or the alinea. A typographical character commonly used to denote individual paragraphs, it resembles a backward P.
September 14, 2007
serenete commented on the word pilcrow
So that's what it's called! :)
September 19, 2007
colleen commented on the word pilcrow
¶
December 27, 2007
dinkum commented on the word pilcrow
WORD: pilcrow
DEFINITION: the paragraph mark ( ¶ )
EXAMPLES:
(1) ' From the Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 30:
' This story comes from Shady Characters by Keith Houston, a paean to typographical curiosities old and new. Houston's "magnificent cast" includes the asterisk, with its origins in the star-like cuneiform symbol denoting heaven; the humble hyphen -- not to be confused with a bewildering variety of dashes; and a modern upstart, the interrobang, a conflation of the question mark and the exclamation mark, as in "how cool is that?!" Houston's book is filled with passion, whether its author is decrying the neglect of the noble pilcrow, or the sad fate of the percontation point, a reverse question mark invented by the sixteenth-century printer Henry Denham to indicate a rhetorical question.
--- Reprinted in the Wall Street Journal. "Notable & Quotable." October 28, 2013. (Page A15).
(2) For more about the pilcrow, its origin and etymology, see Keith Houston's two articles on <b>Slate.com</b>:
<< http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/09/25/the_pilcrow_how_the_paragraph_punctuation_mark_evolved_from_ancient_greece.html >>
November 2, 2013