Pilcrow

The pilcrow started life as a C, for capitulum, Latin for chapter. Scribes drew vertical strokes through it, and over the centuries it turned into the reversed P we know. In many manuscripts it was painted in later, in red ink, by rubricators, specialists who worked on spaces the scribe had reserved.

A popular theory connects it with the paragraph indent: early printers went on reserving those spaces, nobody filled them in, and the gap itself came to signal a new paragraph. The name is a worn-down form of “paragraph”, which passed through Old French as pelagraphe, and word processors still show ¶ when you turn on formatting marks.