diff --git a/contrib/awk/doc/awk.1 b/contrib/awk/doc/awk.1
index df74e0f4c331..932946acab91 100644
--- a/contrib/awk/doc/awk.1
+++ b/contrib/awk/doc/awk.1
@@ -2598,7 +2598,7 @@ Brian Kernighan of Bell Labs
 provided valuable assistance during testing and debugging.
 We thank him.
 .SH COPYING PERMISSIONS
-Copyright \(co) 1996 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+Copyright \(co\) 1996 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
 .PP
 Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of
 this manual page provided the copyright notice and this permission