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Symbolwise helps you identify a symbol, understand what it means, where it came from, how it's used in different contexts — and how confidently the evidence supports that interpretation.
A gravestone, a clothing label, a dashboard, a coat of arms — narrow from the place.
Search by what it looks like, not just its name.
Don't know its name? Narrow down by shape, symmetry and colour instead.
Laundry labels, dashboards, medicine, packaging and more.
The full published catalogue.
See commonly confused symbols side by side.
Mysterious, dangerous-looking, spiritual — browse by how symbols come across.
An ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic sign shaped like a cross with a looped top, signifying life.
A sideways figure-eight (∞) denoting an unbounded quantity in mathematics, and used more broadly as a symbol of endlessness.
A circle enclosing a vertical line and two downward diagonal lines, originally designed for the British nuclear disarmament movement.
A square containing a circle, crossed through with an X, instructing that a garment must not be machine-dried.
An amber or red dashboard icon shaped like an engine block, indicating a detected vehicle malfunction.
Japan's industrial standard mark.
A tub-shaped outline with a wavy water line, the GINETEX base symbol for washing instructions on a garment care label.
A triangle outline, the GINETEX base symbol for bleaching instructions on a garment care label.
Two grace notes distinguished by a single diagonal stroke through the stem, instructing very different treatments of the beat.
Two logic signs differing only in whether the horizontal stroke is single or doubled, and separating proof from truth.
Two small circles of the same size on a circuit diagram, one filled and one hollow, meaning a permanent joint and a connection point.
Two horizontal strokes of different lengths that do opposite jobs: one interrupts a sentence, the other joins two things.
One is a coded observation defined by treaty; the other is a picture a designer chose. They are unrelated.
Two devices worn on the same ribbon that answer different questions: one names where you were, the other counts how many times.
Two editorial brackets that look interchangeable and make opposite claims about whether the text was ever there.
Two hand motifs on monuments that popular symbol guides conflate constantly and that are trivially easy to tell apart.
Every meaning on Symbolwise is sourced, dated and rated for confidence across several independent dimensions — identity, official meaning, historical origin, cultural meaning, current use and visual match — each with a plain-English rationale, never a bare percentage. Disputed and sensitive interpretations are clearly marked, not hidden or resolved into a single false answer.
Read our methodology →