Writing instruments with a wooden shaft and a graphite core that leaves marks on paper when you write or draw.
From French 'pencil' meaning a small brush, from Latin 'penicillus' meaning 'little tail.' The word originally described artists' brushes before it shifted to describe the graphite writing tool after graphite was discovered and popularized in the 1600s.
Pencils are one of the rare tools that we use exactly the same way Shakespeare and Benjamin Franklin did—we're still rubbing graphite on paper to leave marks. Unlike pens or keyboards, the pencil hasn't fundamentally changed in 400 years, making it a surprisingly stable technology in a world of constant innovation.
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