Play symbol
Play. A triangle pointing right starts playback, and more broadly means start.
How to read it
The right-pointing triangle is the play symbol standardised by ISO and the IEC. Jason Kennedy of Auckland University of Technology, writing in The Conversation, traces why it points right to tape recorders: the fresh tape sat on the left reel and moved to the right while playing, so the button took the direction the tape moved. The play symbol now marks the start of other things too, such as the wash cycle on a washing machine.
The first play buttons
The Philips EL3300 of 1963, the first mass-market compact cassette recorder, had a play arrow that pointed up, the way its button slid. The Sony TC-100 of 1968 was one of the first recorders to drop text labels for the icons used today, with a right-pointing triangle for play; Kennedy calls it a likely candidate for the first use, while noting the records are hazy.
Look-alikes
Two triangles together mean fast forward (pointing right) or rewind (pointing left). Two triangles against a bar skip to the next or previous track, and a triangle beside two bars is a play/pause toggle.
More power and device symbols
Sources
- 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, Play
- Miscellaneous Technical, Range: 2300–23FF (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Unicode Consortium, U+23E9, U+23EA, U+23ED, U+23EF
Last reviewed September 26, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research