About Section Sign
Section Sign is the Unicode character § at codepoint U+00A7 in the Latin-1 Supplement block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The mark that names a numbered subdivision, most often a statutory section. Unicode files it as Po in the Latin-1 Supplement, encoded in version 1.1 and inherited from ISO 8859-1, and its own annotation is unusually direct: used in referencing numbered sections or paragraphs. Doubling it marks a range. The chart's single cross-reference is to the top half section sign, a character that exists for scholars transcribing manuscripts. In English typography it also holds fourth place in the traditional footnote sequence, after the asterisk, the dagger and the double dagger — a position it keeps by being available rather than by meaning anything.
Typical uses
- Citing a numbered section of a statute, contract or standard
- Doubled for a range of sections
- The fourth mark in the traditional footnote sequence
At a glance
- U+00A7, Latin-1 Supplement; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category Po
- East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class AI; Windows-1252 byte 0xA7
- HTML: § and the legacy § without a semicolon
- No decomposition; stable under all four normalisation forms
Historical Notes
Origins
Where the shape came from is genuinely unsettled and the sources hedge, so this note does not pick a winner. What is not in dispute is that the modern form has been in use since the fifteenth century and that its drawing is left entirely to the typeface.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, at a codepoint it inherited from ISO 8859-1 and therefore from Windows-1252 as well. The chart's only cross-reference is to U+2E39 TOP HALF SECTION SIGN in Supplemental Punctuation — a character encoded so that manuscript transcriptions can record a half-drawn form, which is a fair measure of how carefully the standard treats this family.
Where it is ordinary furniture
The mark is not evenly distributed across languages, and the placement of the number is not either. In German statute the sign comes first and the number follows; in Swedish it is the other way round. Both conventions are visible in the statutory texts themselves.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Section Sign
To use the Section 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: '\A7';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u00A7' evaluates to §. In Python source, write '\u00A7'.
The character encodes to C2 A7 as UTF-8 bytes and 00A7 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 167.
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
- Doubling is a convention, not a character: two section signs in a row mark a range. There is no single doubled codepoint.
- Windows-1252 byte 0xA7, so it survives legacy pipelines. Mis-decoded UTF-8 shows it as §.
- East Asian Width Ambiguous — two terminal cells in a CJK locale, one elsewhere.
- Line break class AI, so a line breaker resolves it as ideographic in an East Asian context and as ordinary punctuation otherwise.
- Both HTML forms are valid: § and the semicolon-less §.
In the Wild
Germany's Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch runs to 1,708,808 characters and carries 5,661 section signs. Sweden's Brottsbalken, 343,823 characters, carries 1,161.
They do not agree on where the number goes. In the German text the sign precedes its number 5,111 times and follows it 73; in the Swedish text it follows 932 times and precedes nine. Same character, same job, opposite word order, and each text is almost perfectly consistent with itself.
The German constitution is the useful control. The Grundgesetz runs to 189,199 characters and contains exactly one section sign — and that one is a reference to an ordinary statute inside a transitional article. The Basic Law numbers its own provisions as Artikel and never reaches for the mark.
One more surprise, from a page with no legal content at all: English Wikipedia's article on isotopes carried 120 section signs, every one of them in a navigation template using the mark as a section anchor. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
How do I cite a range of sections?
Double the sign. Two section signs before the first number is the standard convention in both German and American practice.
Does the number go before or after?
It depends on the language. German writes the sign first, Swedish writes it second, and each is near-universal within its own text.
Is it the same as the pilcrow?
No. The pilcrow marks a paragraph, this marks a numbered section, and Unicode notes that some European usage swaps their roles.
Why does my text show §?
Because UTF-8 bytes are being decoded as Windows-1252. The character is fine; the decoding is not.