About Reversed Pilcrow Sign
Reversed Pilcrow Sign is the Unicode character ⁋ at codepoint U+204B in the General Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The pilcrow drawn the other way round. Unicode files it as Po in General Punctuation, encoded in version 3.0, with two cross-references — to the ordinary pilcrow and to the paragraphus mark in Supplemental Punctuation — and no alias, no annotation and no stated use. Its Bidi_Mirrored property is No, and so is the ordinary pilcrow's, which means no text engine will substitute one for the other when text changes direction: the mirrored form has to be placed deliberately. There is no HTML named entity and no Windows-1252 slot.
Typical uses
- A second kind of paragraph division, distinguished from the first by shape
- Scholarly transcription, alongside the other marks in the pilcrow family
- Display typography, where the mirrored form is used for its shape
At a glance
- U+204B, General Punctuation; Unicode 3.0 (1999); general category Po
- East Asian Width Neutral; line break class AL; Bidi_Mirrored No
- No HTML named entity and no Windows-1252 slot
- The chart entry carries no alias, no annotation and no stated use
Historical Notes
Origins
The character arrived with a name and two pointers to relatives, and that is unusually little. Nothing has been added to the entry since.
Unicode
Unicode 3.0, released in 1999, in General Punctuation, in the same run of additions that brought several other minor marks into the block. Its two cross-references point at the ordinary pilcrow and at U+2E4D PARAGRAPHUS MARK, a Supplemental Punctuation character encoded for manuscript transcription.
Not a right-to-left variant
The obvious guess is that a mirrored paragraph mark exists for right-to-left text, and the property data rules it out. Bidi_Mirrored is No on this character and on the ordinary pilcrow, so a conforming implementation will never swap one for the other automatically. Whatever the mirrored form is for, direction handling is not it.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Reversed Pilcrow Sign
To use the Reversed Pilcrow 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: '\204B';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u204B' evaluates to ⁋. In Python source, write '\u204B'.
The character encodes to E2 81 8B as UTF-8 bytes and 204B as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8267.
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. Nothing will substitute this character for the ordinary pilcrow in right-to-left text, or the reverse.
- No named HTML entity. Write ⁋ or ⁋.
- No Windows-1252 slot, so it does not survive legacy pipelines.
- East Asian Width Neutral and line break class AL — one terminal cell, treated as alphabetic material for breaking.
- Font coverage is patchy and worth checking before committing to it; the character is rare enough that omission is common.
In the Wild
On 5 August 2026 English Wikipedia's article about the pilcrow carried this character twice, listing it in its own inventory of the family — once in an infobox of related characters and once in the sentence that enumerates them. Neither is a use.
Nothing else carried it: not the Japanese punctuation article that carried specimens of nine other marks the same day, and not the typography pages that carry the punctuation navigation template.
Twenty-seven years after it was encoded, the character appears only as an entry in a list of characters. That is consistent with a mark that was given a codepoint and never given a job. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Is it for right-to-left text?
No. Bidi_Mirrored is No on both this character and the ordinary pilcrow, so nothing substitutes one for the other automatically.
What does it mean?
Unicode assigns it no use. Any meaning is one a document establishes for itself.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Use ⁋ or ⁋.
Will it render?
Not reliably. Support in ordinary text faces is patchy and worth checking before use.