Pause symbol
Pause. Two vertical bars stop playback for now, so it can carry on from the same place.
Easily confused with
How to read it
The two bars are the pause symbol. IEC 60417-5111, “pause; interruption”, is defined for the control that interrupts the run of, for example, a tape, while the drive mechanism keeps turning. Unicode encodes it as U+23F8, the double vertical bar, and a triangle beside the bars, U+23EF, is the play/pause toggle found on a single button.
Where the bars came from
Nobody has pinned down where the pause bars came from, Jason Kennedy wrote in The Conversation; he notes they look like the caesura, the mark for a break in poetry and music. Gizmodo in 2010 listed other suggestions, the symbol for an open connection in an electrical schematic and a stop square with its middle cut out, before settling on the caesura too.
Look-alikes
The filled square is stop.
Read next
- Next in Power and device symbolsStop symbolA filled square means stop: it stops playback or recording.
- The same shape in African flagsFlag of TanzaniaTanzania’s flag is divided diagonally by a black band edged in gold, from the bottom corner by the pole to the top corner at the fly, with green above and blue below. Tanzania’s Daily News explains the green as vegetation and fertile land, the black as the people, the gold as the country’s natural wealth and the blue as its lakes, rivers and ocean.
More power and device symbols
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with lines.
Sources
- ISO/IEC/JTC1 Graphical Symbols for Office Equipment, Table of IEC 60417, ISO 7000 and ISO/IEC 13251 power symbols, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Internet Archive copy), IEC 5111
- Miscellaneous Technical, Range: 2300–23FF (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Unicode Consortium, U+23F8, U+23EF
- Play, pause, rewind – where do these universal media symbols come from?, Jason Kennedy, Auckland University of Technology, 20 July 2026, The Conversation
- The Secret Histories of Those @#$%ing Computer Symbols, Bryan Gardiner, 16 August 2010, Gizmodo, Pause
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 26, 2026. How we research
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