(1) In word processing and text editing, a paragraph is a collection of words and sentences that contain an end-of-line character (return, line feed or both) at the end. From the viewpoint of the software, even a single word followed by a return is a paragraph. See
CR/LF.
(2) In DOS programming, a 16 byte block. Memory addresses are generated as "segment:offset," where the segment is expressed in paragraphs. As a result of this architecture, there are 4,096 possibilities for expressing each memory byte, a situation that has added a lot of confusion at the debugging level.
To compute an address, the segment register is shifted left four bits, which effectively multiplies it by 16. For example, in the address A000:0100, the A000 becomes A0000, as follows:
Segment A0000 655,360
Offset 0100 256
Result A0100 655,616