pencil,slender rod of a solid marking substance, such as graphite, enclosed in a cylinder of wood, metal, or plastic; used as an implement for writing, drawing, or marking. In 1565 the German-Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner first described a writing instrument in which graphite, then thought to be a type of lead, was inserted into a wooden holder. Gesner was the first to describe graphite as a separate mineral, and in 1779 the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele showed it to be a form of carbon. The name graphite is from the Greek graphein, “to write.” The modern lead pencil became possible when an unusually pure deposit of graphite was discovered in 1564 in Borrowdale, Cumberland, Eng.

The hardness of writing pencils, which is related to the proportion of clay (used as a binder) to graphite in the lead, is usually designated by numbers from one, the softest, to four, the hardest. Artists’ drawing pencils range in a hardness designation generally given from 8B, the softest, to F, the hardest. The designation of the hardness of drafting pencils ranges from HB, the softest, to 10H, the hardest.

The darkness of a pencil mark depends on the number of small particles of graphite deposited by the pencil. The particles are equally black (though graphite is never truly black) regardless of the hardness of the lead; only the size and number of particles determine the apparent degree of blackness of the pencil mark. The degree of hardness of a lead is a measure of how much the lead resists abrasion by the fibres of the paper.