Coronis (textual symbol)



A coronis (κορωνίς, korōnís, pl. κορωνίδες, korōnídes) is a textual symbol found in ancient Greek papyri that was used to mark the end of an entire work or of a major section in poetic and prose texts. The coronis was generally placed in the left-hand margin of the text and was often accompanied by a paragraphos or a forked paragraphos (diple obelismene).

The coronis is encoded by Unicode as part of the Supplemental Punctuation block, at.

Etymology
Liddell and Scott's Greek–English Lexicon gives the basic meaning of korōnis as "crook-beaked" from which a general meaning of "curved" is supposed to have derived. Pierre Chantraine concurs and derives the word from κορώνη (korōnē), "crow", assigning the meaning of the epithet's use in reference to the textual symbol to the same semantic range of "curve". But, given the fact that the earliest coronides actually take the form of birds, there has been debate about whether the name of the textual symbol initially referred to use of a decorative bird to mark a major division in a text or if these pictures were a secondary development that played upon the etymological relation between korōnē, "crow", and korōnis, as in "curved".