what does this symbol mean?

Interface icons

The small icons on websites and apps, from the hamburger menu to the share and save icons: what each one does, and where it came from.

Menus 4 symbols

Actions 3 symbols

About interface icons

Interface icons are the small drawings on buttons in apps and websites that say what a button does without words. Several stand for physical things, like the floppy disk for saving, and the menu icons have nicknames taken from food. This section covers the icons people most often ask about. Each page says what the icon does, where it came from and what it is mistaken for.

Menus

Three stacked lines are the hamburger menu, which opens a menu, usually the site’s main navigation. Norm Cox, who designed the interface of the Xerox Star workstation, told Gizmodo in 2014 that he drew it for the Star as a “container” for contextual menu choices, made to mimic the look of the menu list it opens. Three dots in a column (kebab) or in a row (meatballs) are a “more” button, and a three-by-three grid (bento) opens a panel of a company’s other apps. Google’s Material icons name them more_vert, more_horiz and apps. The food names come from a cartoon by Michael Babich, which the linguist Arnold Zwicky described in 2018 as likening the icons to a hamburger, a döner kebab, a bento box and meatballs.

Actions

Three joined dots are the share icon, which opens the ways to send something to someone else. iPhones and iPads use a different share icon, and the eSafety Commissioner’s Be Connected chart of icons shows both. The save icon is a floppy disk: How-To Geek explains that programs of the 1980s and 1990s drew saving as the disk people saved to, and that decades later Microsoft Word and Paint still do. The feed icon, a dot with two arcs, marks a website’s RSS or Atom feed. Microsoft’s RSS team announced in December 2005 that Internet Explorer 7 would adopt the icon used in Firefox, and Outlook followed.

Sources

  1. Who Designed the Hamburger Icon?, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, 31 March 2014, Gizmodo
  2. Which icon is that? (Be Connected visual glossary of icons), Be Connected guide to common technology icons, poster version 9, eSafety Commissioner, Australian Government, Poster labels (icons noted in NOTES.md)
  3. Material Icons codepoints (MaterialIcons-Regular.codepoints), Google Material Design icons, font/MaterialIcons-Regular.codepoints, Google (material-design-icons repository on GitHub), more_vert, more_horiz
  4. Know Your Menu, Arnold Zwicky, 1 April 2018, Arnold Zwicky’s Blog
  5. Using Google apps (Be Connected), Be Connected topic library, eSafety Commissioner, Australian Government
  6. From Idea to Icon: 50 Years of the Floppy Disk, Benj Edwards, 2021, How-To Geek
  7. Icons: It’s still orange, Jane Kim, 14 December 2005, Microsoft RSS Team Blog (Microsoft Learn archive)

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 14, 2026. How we research