Two short vertical bars side by side, the icon for pausing whatever's playing without stopping it outright the way ⏹️ Stop Button does. It sits on every video and music player going, and it gets typed just as often to mean a break rather than an end, a project or a relationship put on hold instead of shut down.
What ⏸️ means
A pair of equally tall parallel lines or bars vertically placed next to each other on a faded blue square.
The ⏸️ Pause Button emoji represents a pause, as the name suggests. This pause could signify a 'break', a sense of holding up, waiting, or even temporarily shutting down.
How and when to use it
- We generally pause a video or a song to tend to our surroundings or to eavesdrop. Hence, while talking about 'pausing' something literally or metaphorically to listen to something else, you can use ⏸️.
- A few instances for the previous use-case are: "Pause your mind for a second and listen to your soul for once ⏸️" or "The chaos within is a lot louder than the chatter outside. And I don't know which to pause ⏸️".
- Pausing something doesn't exactly mean it's resumed the next second (we're not always Netflix and chilling). A pause could stretch indefinitely. Like, "I'm so proud to have resumed my passion after a 10-year long break ⏸️" or "Sometimes, maybe, just maybe it's not over yet ⏸️".
- A pause could also suggest 'rest'. For example, "Pause your thoughts before bed ⏸️", "I appreciate your concern, but I'd love it if you held onto those words of concern for a bit ⏸️", or "Dude. Give it a rest ⏸️".
Other Names
- ⏸️ Pause
- ⏸️ A Pair of Vertical Bars
- ⏸️ Breathing Space
- ⏸️ Halt
- ⏸️ Rest
- ⏸️ Recess
- ⏸️ Pause Symbol
- ⏸️ Intermission
- ⏸️ Interval
The lowdown
- Category
- Symbols › av-symbol
- Codepoints
U+23F8 U+FE0F- Emoji version
- Emoji 0.7
- Shortcodes
:pause_button:GitHub- Keywords
- bar, button, double, pause, vertical
How it looks across platforms
Seeing a blank box instead of the emoji somewhere? Here's why that happens. Curious why the designs above don't match to begin with? Here's why that happens too.
⚡ Quick round
Which joined the keyboard first — ⏸️ Pause Button or ⬅️ Left Arrow?