Using the Pilcrow Symbol
The pilcrow marks the start or the number of a paragraph. Most people first meet it in Microsoft Word, where the ¶ button on the Home tab reveals every hidden paragraph break, space and tab, and the same mark sits at the end of each paragraph in the document. The keyboard toggle is Ctrl + Shift + 8 on Windows and Command + 8 on a Mac, and turning it on is the fastest way to find out why two lines refuse to line up.
In legal writing
Courts and litigators cite paragraphs of numbered documents with the pilcrow: "Compl. ¶ 14" points to paragraph fourteen of a complaint, and "¶¶ 3–5" covers a range. Leave a space between the sign and the number, exactly as with the section symbol, and double the mark for a plural. The two signs are not interchangeable. Statutes and codes are divided into sections, so they take §; affidavits, declarations and pleadings are numbered by paragraph, so they take ¶.
Where the shape comes from
Medieval scribes marked a new topic with a capital C for capitulum, "little head", and rubricators later drew it in red with a vertical stroke through it. Over centuries the stroke grew into two stems and the C filled in, giving the backwards-P shape we have now. The name pilcrow is an English corruption of the French pelagraphe, itself a mangled "paragraph". In early printed books the pilcrow was so ornate that printers left space for it to be added by hand, and when the hand-work never happened the gap became the indented first line we still use today.
On the web and in apps
Documentation sites and blogs add a small ¶ next to each heading that appears on hover; clicking it copies a link to that exact heading. Editors such as Google Docs and Pages also use the mark for their "show non-printing characters" option, and email clients display it when formatting marks are on. The character is part of Latin-1, so it renders on every device and inside plain-text fields.
Typing it
Windows Alt + 0182 and Mac Option + 7 are the keyboard routes. Neither iPhone nor Android has a dedicated key; on Android, Gboard hides it on the second symbol page beside the bullet and the tilde, while iPhone users need a text replacement or a paste from this page.
Outside documents
The pilcrow has an editorial, bookish flavour, so writers, editors and proofreaders put it in bios and display names as a quiet trade badge, and it fits a typewriter font aesthetic well. It rarely appears in usernames because most platforms reject punctuation in handles, but display names on X, Bluesky and Discord accept it. For the whole traditional footnote sequence — asterisk, dagger, double dagger, section sign, parallels, pilcrow — see the dagger symbol page.