A pencil is a chicken tracks or drawing instrument consisting of a lank stick of pigment (usually graphite, but can also be coloured pigment or charcoal) and clay, customarily encased in a gaunt wood cylinder, though critique and plastic sheaths are also used. Pencils are distinct from pens, which capitalization a flowing marking material.

Although deposits of graphite had been found in other parts of the world, they were not of the same purity and quality as the Borrowdale find, and Personalized Pencils had to be crushed to remove the impurities, leaving only graphite powder. England continued to enjoy a monopoly on the production of pencils until a method of reconstituting the graphite dust was found. Today, the town of Keswick, near the original findings of block graphite, bankrupt a pencil museum. The first pursuit to manufacture graphite sticks from powdered graphite was in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1662. It absorbed a mixture of graphite, sulphur, and antimony.