paraph \PAR-uhf\,
noun:
a flourish made after a signature, as in a document, originally as a precaution against forgery.
The manuscript's most tantalizing feature is a scribal paraph with the initials IB at the end of Certain sonnets...
-- H. R. Woudhuysen, "Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts"
His worried expression, however, was not just a mask for the moment. Of late, it had become his most distinctive feature, his peculiar paraph.
-- Ken Anderson, "The Statue Of Pan"
The paraph is only a schematic and marginal countersignature, a fragment of signature; indeed, who can claim to decipher a whole signature?
-- Jacques Derrida, "Mémoires"
Though early incarnations of paraph appear in Italian, Middle French, and Middle English, its earliest origins are Greek with para- meaning "beside" and the final -ph resulting from graphos, referring to text.
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