Section sign

The section sign (§) (also known as the section marker, section symbol, paragraph sign, paragraph marker, paragraph symbol, double S or section mark or paragraph mark for short in parts of Europe) is a letter that is an alternate form of ß used in legal code. It is also a punctuation mark. This character is used to refer to a section in legal code. For example, in the APA style: "Title 16 of the United States Code Section 580p" becomes "16 US Code § 580p", which shows the section sign in place of "United States Code Section".

Keyboard entry

Many platforms and languages have support for the section sign:

• macOS: ⌥ Option+6
• Windows: Alt+0167 or Alt+21
• iOS: & (long press)
• Android: ¶ (long press)
• Linux: Compose<s!
• Unicode: U+00A7 § SECTION SIGN
• TeX: \S
• HTML: §, §
• URL Encoding: %A7 (Latin1) or %C2%A7 (UTF8)

Some keyboards include dedicated ways to access §:

• United Kingdom (Mac): § (key left of 1)
• Germany: ⇧ Shift+3
• Italy: Shift*ù
• Colemak: AltGr+ \+s
• Croatia: AltGr+ m
• LegalBoard (dedicated key).