U+23F8 "⏸" Double Vertical Bar Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
⏸
U+23F8 "⏸" Double Vertical Bar is a graphical symbol officially designated as the "pause icon," commonly used in media players and audio interfaces to represent a pause function, thereby temporarily halting playback without stopping the file or stream. It visually consists of two short, parallel vertical lines of equal length and thickness, distinct from the single vertical bar of the "stop" command. This character is encoded in the Unicode Miscellaneous Technical block and was introduced in Unicode version 7.0, serving as a standardized digital representation for the pervasive playback control found across devices and software.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+23F8 |
| Version Added | 7.0 |
| Name | Double Vertical Bar |
| Block | Miscellaneous Technical |
| General Category | Other Symbol |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Other Neutral |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ⏸ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ⏸ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE2 0x8F 0xB8 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x23F8 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000023F8 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u23f8 |