A good way to impress people at parties. Not.
12 March 2007
What do you call the symbol ¶ ? Thanks to BeldarBlog, we now know that it’s called a pilcrow. The history and etymology is at the mostly reliable Wikipedia.
It seems that § does not have a sexy name like “pilcrow”; it’s just called a section sign.
Incidentally, if you want to type a ¶, hold the ALT key down and hit 20 on your numeric keypad (make sure the NumLock is engaged). To type §, same instructions, except hit 21 instead of 20.