pause button
Symbols
What it means when sent
The pause button. It also means taking a break or putting something on hold, and it is not the same as the full stop ⏹️.
- Code point
- U+23F8 U+FE0F
- Code points
- 2
2 code points joined together. That is why some devices need several backspaces to delete it, and why a character counter may score it as 2.
It needs a trailing U+FE0F to render in colour. Without it the glyph falls back to black and white — that is what gets lost when the emoji is copied and pasted.
Symbols usually carry an older meaning. 💯 is not the number one hundred but total agreement, and 🈵 and 🈳 are opposites — full and vacant.
Using emojis
- Tap the character to copy it and paste it anywhere — it is text, not an image, so its size follows the font around it.
- Sender and receiver on different devices see different drawings. Apple, Google and Samsung each draw their own, and for some emojis that changes the meaning (🙃, 😅).
- At work, an emoji standing in for a sentence invites misreading. In some countries a bare 👍 reads as a brush-off.
- Putting emojis in a page title does not help search ranking — they are usually stripped from the result.
- Skin-tone variants are not listed here. Only the base form is, because the meaning does not change with them.
Common questions
Q. What does ⏸️ mean?
The pause button. It also means taking a break or putting something on hold, and it is not the same as the full stop ⏹️.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it pause button, code point U+23F8 U+FE0F. It sits under Symbols.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
Only if the trailing U+FE0F comes along. Without it the glyph falls back to black and white.