☞ Index

KatzenklavierKatzenklavier Regular
edited January 2011 in Spurious Generalities
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☞The symbol ☞ is a punctuation mark, called an index, manicule (from the Latin root 'manus' for 'hand') or fist. Though rare today, this symbol was in common use between the 12th and 18th centuries in the margins of books, and was formerly included in lists of standard punctuation marks. Its typical use is as a bullet-like symbol to direct the reader’s attention to important text, having roughly the same meaning as the word “attention” or “note”. Some encyclopedias use it in articles to cross-reference, as in ☞other articles. It occasionally sees use in magazines and comic books to indicate to the reader that a story on the right-hand page continues onto the next.

It primarily fell out of favor because its complex design made it unfit for handwriting, and its wide size made it difficult to fit on a typewriter or on early, low-resolution, monospaced computer fonts. It was therefore not included in early forms of ASCII. It was, however, added to Unicode.

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