White Right Pointing Index

It means look here, at this line. Put this manicule, also called a printer's fist or pointing hand, before a link, instruction, tip, or punchline when a plain arrow feels too cold.

The pointing hand began as a reader's doodle in book margins. Its recognizable European history reaches at least the twelfth century, when scribes and readers drew hands to flag memorable lines, corrections, disagreements, and passages to return to.

Nobody invented it. It grew from handwritten annotation into printable type that publishers could set straight into the page.

How did the pointing hand change?

In manuscripts the hand was personal: this struck me, come back to this. During the Renaissance, printers cut manicules for marginal notes, section openings, and title pages, while readers kept drawing their own alongside.

Later it went public, from reading aid to salesmanship. Nineteenth-century posters and shop signs used the big hand to drag your eyes to the bargain, the door, the fine print — the ancestor of today's look-here attention grab.

The arrow took over plain direction. The pointing hand kept the human finger: not just that way, but hey, read this.