Pilcrow ¶ (paragraph mark)

• Formatting marks in Word: Word shows ¶ at the end of every paragraph when formatting marks are turned on. Press Ctrl+Shift+8 or click the ¶ button on the Home tab to toggle them. The mark never prints.
• Legal citations: court filings and contracts cite numbered paragraphs, as in “Compl. ¶ 14” or “¶¶ 3–5.”
• Proofreading: an editor writes ¶ in the margin to mean “start a new paragraph here.”
• Web documentation: some sites show ¶ next to headings as a permalink you can click to copy a link to that section.

The pilcrow is not the section sign (§). In legal writing, § refers to sections of statutes and codes; ¶ refers to paragraphs.

Medieval scribes marked new sections with a C for the Latin capitulum, “chapter.” Over time the letter gained vertical strokes and a filled bowl, producing ¶. The marks were often added later in red ink, and when space was left for them but they were never filled in, the blank indent remained. That is one common explanation for why paragraphs still start with an indented first line.

Two related characters exist in Unicode. ⸿ (capitulum) is the older C-shaped form, and ⁋ (reversed pilcrow) is a rare mirrored variant. Neither replaces ¶ in modern writing.

• LaTeX: \P produces ¶.
• Word: Insert > Symbol > Special Characters lists it as “Paragraph.”
• Websites: when ¶ serves as a heading anchor, it is usually styled small and gray so it doesn’t compete with the heading text.
• Plain text: ¶ is a visible character, not a line break. Pasting it into a text field won’t create a new paragraph.