What § means
It points to a numbered section of a document. In “§ 122,” the section mark, nicknamed the silcrow, works like an address: it tells you where to find a provision, not what it says. Typesetters put a nonbreaking space after it so the mark never lands on a different line from its number.
By the 15th century, § already marked text divisions much as it does today. Its origin is disputed: one account sees two joined letter S’s, from Latin signum sectionis (“section sign”); another sees the Greek paragraphos, a stroke scribes used to mark breaks. German legal writing calls the unit Paragraf, so German speakers read § as “paragraph.”
Formal and citation-heavy. Follow your citation guide; otherwise write “section,” especially at the start of a sentence.
Do not treat § and ¶ as interchangeable.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Questions people ask
1Why does § show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type §
§\00A7Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.