About Pilcrow Sign Paragraph Sign
Pilcrow Sign Paragraph Sign is the Unicode character ¶ at codepoint U+00B6 in the Latin-1 Supplement block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The paragraph mark. Unicode files it as Po in the Latin-1 Supplement, encoded in version 1.1, with the formal alias paragraph sign and a note that some European usage employs it as a section sign — so the roles of this mark and the section sign are not fixed everywhere. The chart cross-references three relatives: the reversed pilcrow, the curved stem paragraph sign ornament and the capitulum, the medieval ancestor. Doubling it marks a range of numbered paragraphs, the same convention the section sign uses. It has no decomposition and is stable under every normalisation form.
Typical uses
- Citing a numbered paragraph in legal and academic writing, doubled for a range
- The formatting-marks display in word processors, where it ends every paragraph
- Permalink anchors beside headings in software documentation
At a glance
- U+00B6, Latin-1 Supplement; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category Po
- East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class AI; Windows-1252 byte 0xB6
- HTML: ¶ and the legacy ¶ without a semicolon
- Bidi_Mirrored No — it does not flip in right-to-left text
Historical Notes
Origins
The manuscript history belongs to the mark rather than to the codepoint. What Unicode records is narrower: the formal alias paragraph sign, a note that some European usage treats the mark as a section sign, and cross-references to the reversed form, to an ornamental variant and to the capitulum it descends from.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, at a codepoint inherited from ISO 8859-1 and Windows-1252. The standard also encoded the ancestor and the mirrored form separately, which is why the family has four members rather than one: this mark, U+204B, U+2761 and U+2E3F. Only this one arrived through the eight-bit codepages, and it is the only one of the four in ordinary use.
An annotation worth reading twice
Unicode's note that the pilcrow serves as a section sign in some European usage is the standard admitting that the division of labour between the two marks is a local convention rather than a fact about the characters. Anyone building a citation parser has to decide which convention applies before the characters can tell them anything.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Pilcrow Sign Paragraph Sign
To use the Pilcrow Sign Paragraph Sign symbol (¶) in HTML, insert the
entity ¶ directly into your markup. The decimal entity ¶ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\B6';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u00B6' evaluates to ¶. In Python source, write '\u00B6'.
The character encodes to C2 B6 as UTF-8 bytes and 00B6 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 182.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.
Things to know
- Bidi_Mirrored is No, and it is No on the reversed pilcrow too. No text engine will substitute one for the other in right-to-left text; the mirrored form has to be placed deliberately.
- Windows-1252 byte 0xB6. Mis-decoded UTF-8 shows it as ¶.
- East Asian Width Ambiguous, line break class AI — two terminal cells in a CJK locale.
- In word processors it is the paragraph mark itself, and paragraph formatting rides on it. Deleting one merges two paragraphs under one set of formatting.
- Both HTML forms work: ¶ and the semicolon-less ¶.
In the Wild
The pilcrow's two heaviest users are not documents that mark paragraphs. On 5 August 2026 Django's documentation carried thirty-eight and Python's unicodedata page sixteen, and every one is the same thing: the permalink anchor that Sphinx-built documentation places beside a heading, so a reader can copy a link straight to that section.
Elsewhere it is mostly articles about punctuation — seven on English Wikipedia's own pilcrow article, five on its section sign article, a scattering of single occurrences in the punctuation navigation template several typography pages carry.
So the mark's life on the public web today is a link icon in developer documentation. The paragraph it is named for is still marked by an indent. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
What is the ¶ button in my word processor?
It shows formatting marks. The pilcrow it reveals at the end of each paragraph is a real character in the document, and the paragraph's formatting is attached to it.
Why did deleting one merge my paragraphs?
Because that mark carries the paragraph's formatting. Removing it joins the text into a single paragraph under a single set of rules.
Is the reversed pilcrow used for right-to-left text?
No. Both characters have Bidi_Mirrored set to No, so nothing substitutes one for the other automatically.
How do I cite several paragraphs?
Double the mark, the same convention the section sign uses for its own subdivisions.