The History of Typography Marks: From Gutenberg to Unicode

Before punctuation, reading was an athletic event.

Ancient Greek and Roman manuscripts were written in scriptura continua — continuous script with no spaces between words, no punctuation marks, and no distinction between uppercase and lowercase. A sentence from Cicero looked like this: ALLPUNCTUATIONISAFICTIONANDWRITINGISMERELYBREATHRECORDED. Reading aloud was a skill that required parsing the text in real time, and writers assumed their readers were trained performers.

The marks we now take for granted — the period, the comma, the paragraph sign, the section mark — were invented over roughly 2,500 years by scribes, scholars, printers, and typographers solving the same fundamental problem: how do you make written language easy to read and understand?

Their solutions, accumulated across centuries, are now encoded in Unicode. Understanding where these marks came from reveals why they look the way they do and why some of them have such unexpected names.

The Ancient Foundations: Aristophanes of Byzantium

The first systematic punctuation system we know of was developed by Aristophanes of Byzantium, the chief librarian of the Library of Alexandria, around 200 BCE. Aristophanes was concerned with the practical problem of helping readers — including students and performers — navigate long texts.

He invented a system of three dots placed at different heights on the page: - Comma (κόμμα): a dot placed at the bottom of a letter, indicating a short pause — roughly where we'd put a comma today. The Greek word komma means "something cut off." - Colon (κῶλον): a dot placed in the middle of the line, indicating a longer pause — roughly corresponding to a semicolon or colon. The Greek word kolon means "limb" or "clause." - Periodos (περίοδος): a dot placed at the top of the line, indicating a complete stop — the full period. The Greek word means "circuit" or "going around."

Note that these marks indicated rhythm and performance, not grammar in the modern sense. They told a reader where to breathe. The period at the top of the line, not the bottom, is an interesting artifact: Aristophanes placed it high because the sentence ended there, not because it belonged "after" the last word.

Roman scribes adopted and adapted this system inconsistently. Surviving manuscripts show tremendous variation — some scribes used dots between words (interpuncts, like the Roman CAN·YOU·READ·THIS), others used various combinations of marks, and many used none at all. The Dark Ages, which disrupted the transmission of Latin literacy, also disrupted whatever consistency had developed.

The Monastic Scriptoria: Inventing Aids for the Copier

The monks and scholars who preserved Western literacy through the early medieval period had different concerns than the ancient Greeks. They were not primarily performers — they were copyists, producing faithful reproductions of sacred and classical texts. What they needed were marks that helped divide text into units that could be copied without error.

The Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes of the 7th and 8th centuries made a revolutionary change: they introduced word spacing. Once words were visually separated, reading silently became practical, and new demands for punctuation emerged. You no longer needed marks to help you perform a text; you needed marks to show the logical structure of an argument.

The paragraph mark (¶, U+00B6) emerged from this period. Called the pilcrow (from a corruption of "paragraph," which itself comes from the Greek paragraphos, "write beside"), it was originally drawn as a C-shape with a vertical stroke — resembling an inverted P or a stylized C. Medieval scribes used it in the margin to mark the beginning of a new section of argument or narrative. In red or blue ink (colors that were relatively cheap but distinct from the black text), it served as a visible landmark in a sea of prose.

The shape evolved. By the 12th century, the pilcrow had taken on something close to its current form: a backwards P with a doubled stem. Theories about the origin of the shape include a stylized 'P' for paragraphus, or an elaborate initial C that accumulated vertical strokes as scribes found easier ways to draw it quickly.

The Section Sign

The section sign (§, U+00A7) has a similarly practical origin. Known as the silcrow or sectio mark, it was used in legal and theological manuscripts to indicate subdivisions of a text — what we'd now call a section or article. The doubled-S shape (still visible in the sign) is thought to derive from a ligature of two S characters, representing sectio (Latin: "cutting") or possibly signum sectionis (section mark).

The section sign became particularly important in legal documents, where precise reference to numbered subdivisions was essential. In modern typography it survives primarily in legal and academic contexts: §23(b)(1) of the statute, referring to a specific provision. In everyday text it's rare enough that many people don't know its name.

Gutenberg and the Standardization of Punctuation

Johann Gutenberg's development of movable type printing in Europe around 1450 had an unexpected effect on punctuation: it forced standardization.

A scribe could invent their own mark or use one inconsistently. A printing press required physical type — cast metal slugs for each character. If you wanted a comma, you needed a comma slug. The economics of type manufacturing meant that printers converged on a shared set of marks, and within a few generations of printing, the major European languages had settled on remarkably consistent punctuation systems.

Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer-publisher of the late 15th century, is credited with several punctuation innovations that persist today. His 1494 edition of Opera by Pietro Bembo is often cited as the first use of the semicolon as a grammatical connector between related independent clauses. His type designers also developed elegant, compact forms of the comma, period, and colon that influenced European typography for centuries.

Manutius also popularized italic type — originally called Aldine or Venetian type — which allowed more text per line, reducing the cost of books. The convention of using italics for emphasis or foreign words follows directly from Manutius's commercial decisions.

The Stories Behind Specific Marks

The Ampersand (&)

The ampersand (&, U+0026) is one of the most thoroughly documented characters in Unicode. Its origin is a Latin ligature: the letters et (Latin for "and") written joined together. In the cursive handwriting of Roman scribes, et gradually merged into a single flourish that preserved the shapes of both letters but fused them into one.

By the time the mark reached the printing era, it had been abstracted far enough that its origins as et are visible mainly in more careful or elaborate renderings: & looks like a stylized e with a t-crossing visible in some fonts, and in italic &, the e and t are often clearly legible.

The word "ampersand" itself is a contraction of "and per se and" — meaning "& by itself means 'and.'" In recitations of the Latin alphabet during the 17th through 19th centuries, it was common to append the sign to the end of the 26 letters, saying "X, Y, Z, and per se and" — which slurred through repeated use into "ampersand."

The At Sign (@)

The at sign (@, U+0040) is one of the most investigated marks in typography because its pre-email origin was genuinely obscure.

The most widely accepted theory traces it to medieval commercial Latin. Merchants needed a compact way to write ad (Latin for "at" or "to," as in "sold at a price of") or the preposition à (in Italian and Spanish, used for the same purpose). A cursive a with a sweeping tail encircling it appears in commercial documents from at least the 14th century, and by the 15th century appears consistently in Venetian merchant records as a unit marker: "6 @ 1.5 lire" meaning six units at one-and-a-half lire each.

The mark was included in the first American typewriter keyboard (Christopher Latham Sholes's 1873 design) as a commercial symbol, at position 2 on the keyboard (explaining the @-symbol's location on the number row). It was present in the original Baudot telegraphic code and therefore in early computer keyboards.

Ray Tomlinson chose @ for email addresses in 1971 precisely because it was unused in personal names and unambiguous in meaning: user at host. The commercial history of @ as a unit marker made it a natural separator between identity and location.

The Number Sign (#)

The number sign (#, U+0023) — called "hash," "pound," "number sign," "octothorpe," and since 2007 "hashtag" — has the most contested name in typography.

Its origins are clearer than its naming: it derives from the Latin libra pondo ("pound weight"), abbreviated in medieval manuscripts as ℔ (a stylized lb with a horizontal crossbar). This abbreviation for the unit of weight became associated with its equivalent value in money in British commerce — hence "pound" (£ for currency, # for weight). American usage preserved the "#" form as a weight/number marker while British usage evolved separately.

The name "octothorpe" — genuinely peculiar — was coined in 1965 by engineers at Bell Labs who needed a name for the key on the newly designed touch-tone telephone keypad. The "octo" refers to the eight points of the sign; the "thorpe" is disputed (it may reference Jim Thorpe, the Native American athlete, in what was reportedly an elaborate internal joke).

The contemporary usage as "hashtag" (a label prefix on social media, first popularized on Twitter in 2007 by Chris Messina) is the most recent chapter in the sign's history — a repurposing that would be unrecognizable to a medieval grain merchant.

Marks That Didn't Survive

Not all punctuation innovations made it to the modern era. A brief memorial for marks that Unicode preserves as historical curiosities:

The interrobang (‽, U+203D) was invented by advertising executive Martin Speckter in 1962, combining the question mark and exclamation mark into a single elegant symbol for rhetorically charged questions. It was briefly included in some typefaces, appeared on some typewriters, and died in widespread use by the 1970s. Unicode preserves it.

The irony mark (⸮, U+2E2E) was proposed multiple times across history — once by Alcanter de Brahm in 1899, and advocated again more recently — to indicate a sentence was meant sarcastically. The internet developed the "/s" convention instead.

The Love Point (⁀, informally) and various other marks proposed by avant-garde typographers of the 20th century never achieved widespread adoption.

Unicode Preservation

The Unicode standard preserves an extraordinary range of typographic marks, from the commonly used to the genuinely obscure. The General Punctuation block (U+2000–U+206F) alone contains over 100 marks, including various dashes, quotation marks from different national traditions, ellipsis, and specialized editorial marks.

The diversity reflects Unicode's goal of encoding every writing system in current use — and many historical ones. Turkish quotation marks differ from German, which differ from French, which differ from Japanese. Unicode preserves all of them because digital text exchange between these traditions requires each mark to have an unambiguous identity.

Explore the full range of typographic and punctuation marks in our Unicode Lookup tool.

A Timeline of Typography Marks

Next in Series: Typography marks evolved to serve sighted readers. But one of the most important symbolic systems in history was designed specifically for touch. Read how Louis Braille's 1824 invention made its way into the Unicode standard in Braille in Unicode: How a Tactile System Became Digital Text.