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The two reference marks of legal and editorial text. They sit next to each other in citations and are routinely swapped.
§ cites a section; ¶ marks a paragraph. If you are pointing at a numbered division of a statute or contract, you want §. If you are pointing at a block of prose — or looking at the mark your word processor shows when formatting is visible — you want ¶.
Section against paragraph; both are reference marks in legal and editorial text.
Drawn from the visual attributes recorded for each symbol. Only traits the two records disagree about are listed.
| Trait | Section sign | Pilcrow |
|---|---|---|
| Built from | abstract | letter like and abstract |
| Symmetry | point | none |
| Section sign | Pilcrow | |
|---|---|---|
| What it cites | A numbered section | A paragraph |
| Shape | Two overlapping S shapes | A reversed P with two stems |
| Doubled form | §§ cites several sections or a range | ¶¶ cites several paragraphs |
| Everyday appearance | Legislation, contracts, academic citation | Word processors, as the non-printing end-of-paragraph mark |
| Unicode | U+00A7 | U+00B6 |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Pilcrow — Section against paragraph; both are reference marks in legal and editorial text. | Commonly confused with Section sign — Paragraph against section; the two are adjacent in legal citation. |
Unicode Code Chart: Latin-1 Supplement (U+0080–U+00FF)
The Unicode Consortium · retrieved 2026-07-30
Authoritative for the character's code point, name and block only. Unicode assigns identity; it does not define what a symbol means in use.
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-07-30
Tertiary reference. Used for widely-agreed identity and origin summary, not for contested detail or exact dates.
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-07-30
Tertiary reference. Used for widely-agreed identity and origin summary, not for contested detail or exact dates.
Both are drawn as one continuous decorative stroke with a closed loop and a tail that crosses back over itself, which is why a description of the shape alone reaches both. The clef is far taller, spans a stave, and its spiral encircles one specific line — that encircled line is the note G, and it is the only reason the shape is drawn where it is.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
As punctuation the asterisk points at a footnote or marks a required field. In a filename pattern typed at a shell it matches any run of characters, including none — and the shell expands it against real filenames before the command runs, so the command never sees the pattern at all. That expansion is the part people are surprised by.
A single C in a circle asserts copyright. Two C shapes mark a Creative Commons licence — which grants specific permissions while the creator keeps their copyright. A CC badge does not put a work in the public domain, and it does not tell you what you may do on its own: the condition marks beside it carry the terms.