Pause button
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- Shortcode
:pause_button:- Unicode
U+23F8- HTML
⏸- CSS
\23F8- JavaScript
"\u{23F8}"- URL
%E2%8F%B8%EF%B8%8F
What ⏸️ means
Two vertical bars: the pause control. It means stop for a moment, take a break, or put something on hold, with a plan to come back.
People send ⏸️ to pause a discussion, to announce a break from social media, or to stop someone mid-story: 'wait ⏸️, back up'. In work chat it marks a task that is on hold.
Facts
Pause button ⏸️ is an emoji in the symbols category, under av symbol. It is one of the early emoji from Japanese phones, standardized in Unicode 7.0 (2014). On GitHub, Slack and other apps you can type it as :pause_button:. People also look for it with words like “bar”, “button”, “double”, or “pause”.
Timeline
- 2014Added to the emoji standard (Unicode 7.0)
Design history
Google (Noto)
2017
2021
2026
Twemoji (X, Discord)
2016
Google Noto Emoji images: Apache 2.0. Twemoji graphics by X Corp and contributors: CC-BY 4.0.