Words for Today: Obelus and Pilcrow…

In the category of Names for Things You Didn’t Even Know Had Names, I found two odd ones today. Remember the division sign they taught you in elementary school? The one that looks like a minus sign with a dot above and below it? This one: ÷ ? It actually has a name, and it’s an “obelus”. I think it’s funny that I’ve used obeli for forty years and never known what they were called. Apparently the Firefox spell checker has never heard of it either, but that’s how it’s spelled. In a similar typographical vein, the “paragraph sign” that looks like a filled-in backwards “P” with two stems is called a “pilcrow”. Looks like this, if your browser supports it: ¶ .