There’s precious little romance in the phrase “nonprinting characters”—and yet behind it lurks something of a noble pedigree. Nonprinting characters are a series of symbols that it’s possible to display within a word-processed document that won’t show if you print out that document, but which indicate where particular pieces of formatting have been applied, such as paragraph and page breaks, spaces, tabs, and even simple spaces.
Among these largely ignored (and usually invisible) elements of the typed realm, one in particular stands out: the pilcrow, or ¶. Also sometimes known as a paragraph mark, it does indeed mark those points in a document at which a paragraph break has been inserted. Its history, though, is far older even than movable type.
The pilcrow symbol itself developed from the medieval practice of marking sections within a written document with a letter C, standing for the Latin term capitulum meaning a “chapter.” Over time, and thanks to scribal haste, the C was elided with two vertical strokes, a marking that originally indicated an instruction from the scribe writing out a text to other scribes who might be adding to or ornamenting it.
Unlikely though it may seem, the word pilcrow itself is simply an extremely corrupt version of the term paragraph, with the same origin in the Greek term paragraphos, a written stroke that signified a shift in the sense of a text (from para-, meaning “beside,” and graphein, “to write”). The word first appeared in English in 1440 in the form pylcrafte, having been—it’s thought—mangled via old French and scribal transmission.141
Pilcrows, today, covertly adorn almost every word-processed document created—and can be made visible should an author wish, together with a host of other nonprinting characters that includes line breaks (depicted as a bent arrow pointing to the left), page breaks (a dotted line with the words “Page Break” in its middle), and even marks to indicate typed spaces (a tiny dot in the middle of the line for each one), sometimes referred to as “whitespace” marks.
All of these are sometimes known as “control characters,” reflecting the ways in which they determine the appearance of digital text while themselves remaining unseen. They are a kind of programming language for text, complete with a historical pedigree as ancient as the Greek practice of marking the margins of manuscripts with explanatory symbols—including the very first examples of the paragraphos itself.