What’s a Pilcrow?
You might have noticed a curious backward "P" with an extra leg (¶) in certain editing tools or word processing systems. This strange little glyph is called a "pilcrow," and its job is to mark the beginning of a paragraph. While it's found today only in editing contexts, it had
wider use in medieval manuscripts. Pre-pilcrow reading was like a marathon for the brain: There were no breaks. By the Middle Ages, scribes began to use symbols to break up text, which made reading easier, but these symbols weren't standardized. Different scribes used dashes, letters, and even personal symbols. The...
