Dinkus

A dinkus is a small ornamental symbol used to mark a break in text — most often between scenes or sections — when a full chapter break would be too much, but no break at all would feel wrong.

You’ve seen them as three centered asterisks. Or a tiny fleur. Or a star, a leaf, a skull, a chalice, a curious little glyph sitting quietly between paragraphs, doing its work without drawing attention to itself.

But the word dinkus itself is doing something much stranger.

The term comes from American printing and publishing slang, likely emerging in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. It belongs to a family of words printers used for things that were useful, familiar, and oddly difficult to name properly. A dinkus wasn’t a formal typographical classification; it was a practical nickname — the sort of word that arises when people work closely with tools every day and start inventing language to suit their needs.

Linguistically, dinkus appears to be a variant of dink or dinky: words already floating around English to mean something small, insignificant, or trifling. The -us ending doesn’t add meaning so much as texture — a slightly comic, slightly affectionate sound. This is not a word trying to impress anyone.

Which is fitting, because a dinkus isn’t there to impress you either.

Its job is to signal pause. To let the reader breathe. To say, quietly: something has shifted.

What makes the dinkus interesting isn’t just its function, but its refusal to standardize. Unlike chapter headings or paragraph breaks, dinkuses have never been rigidly defined. They’ve always been flexible, decorative, personal. Printers chose them based on available type. Designers chose them based on mood. Authors often never noticed them at all — except when they were missing.

In that way, the dinkus occupies a liminal space. It’s neither text nor silence. Neither sentence nor ornament. It’s a threshold marker — a visual cue that meaning is about to turn a corner.

There’s also something quietly rebellious about the word itself. Dinkus never quite made it into polite linguistic society. You won’t find it in most general dictionaries, and when you do find it, it’s often labeled as informal, slang, or niche. It survives not because it was sanctioned, but because it was useful — passed hand to hand, shop to shop, editor to editor.

Which is how a lot of language actually survives.

In an era where publishing has become increasingly templated and automated, the dinkus remains stubbornly human. It invites choice. It allows personality. It reminds us that books are not just vessels for words, but designed experiences — shaped as much by what we see as by what we read.

So the next time you notice a small symbol resting between scenes, doing nothing flashy at all, remember: that little mark has a name. And like so many good words, it was born not in a lecture hall or a committee meeting, but at a workbench, among people who needed language to do a job — and made it up when existing words wouldn’t cooperate.

Temple Takeaway: Some of the most enduring words aren’t official. They’re practical, affectionate, and quietly indispensable — just like the things they name.