A pencil is a chirography or drawing tackle consisting of a thin stick of pigment (usually graphite, but can also be coloured pigment or charcoal) and clay, ordinarily encased in a thin copse cylinder, though cardboard and plastic sheaths are also used. Pencils are distinct from pens, which advantage a ichorous marking material.
Many pencils across the microcosm and almost all in Europe are graded on the European system using a continuum from "H" (for hardness) Personalized Pencils to "B" (for blackness), as well as "F" (for fine point). The standard writing pencil is graded HB. According to Petroski this system might have been developed in the previous 1900s by Brookman, an English pencil maker. It used "B" for black and "H" for hard; a pencil's grade was described by a sequence or successive Hs or Bs such as BB and BBB for successively softer leads, and HH and HHH for successively harder ones.