The symbol is a punctuation

Punctuation

Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences...

 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

Nota Bene

Nota bene is an Italian and Latin phrase meaning "note well". The phrase first appeared in writing circa 1721.Often abbreviated as "N. B.", nota bene comes from the Latin roots notāre and bene . It is in the singular imperative mood, instructing one individual to note well the matter at hand...

”. 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 ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

. It was, however, added to Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

.

Other names for the symbol include printer's fist, bishop's fist, digit, mutton-fist and pointing hand (see Sherman, p. 10).

The mark is sometimes used in web design

Web design

Web design is the process of planning and creating a website. Text, images, digital media and interactive elements are used by web designers to produce the page seen on the web browser...

s to indicate an active or selected hyper link. In linguistics, the symbol is also often used in Optimality Theoretic

Optimality theory

Optimality theory is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting constraints. OT models grammars as systems that provide mappings from inputs to outputs; typically, the inputs are conceived of as underlying representations, and...

 tableaux to identify the winner in a candidate set. Many video games made in the 80s and 90s, primarily text-based adventure games, use an index as a cursor

Cursor (computers)

In computing, a cursor is an indicator used to show the position on a computer monitor or other display device that will respond to input from a text input or pointing device. The flashing text cursor may be referred to as a caret in some cases...

.

American Science Fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...

 used the Index as a form of margin on the first line of every paragraph in his novel Breakfast Of Champions

Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. Set in the fictional town of Midland City, it is the story of "two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast." One of these men, Dwayne Hoover, is a normal-looking but...

. The literary effect of this was to create separation between each paragraph, reinforcing the stream of consciousness style nature of the text.

Unicode

There are six index symbols in Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

.

• Black left pointing index: U+261A ☚
• Black right pointing index: U+261B ☛
• White left pointing index: U+261C ☜
• White up pointing index: U+261D ☝
• White right pointing index: U+261E ☞
• White down pointing index: U+261F ☟

In addition, the dingbat

Dingbat

A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament" or "printer's character"....

 font Wingdings 2, found in all versions of Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 since Windows 95

Windows 95

Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...

, includes 16 forms of the index, and the original Wingdings

Wingdings

Wingdings are a series of dingbat fonts which render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes...

font features four others (resembling the white Unicode indices).

External links

• Sherman, William. Toward a History of the Manicule, 2005.
• Collection of photographs of manicules on Flickr