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One marks a facility; the other states that water is fit to drink.
Look for the person. A figure bending to an arc of water marks a fountain — a place to drink. A tap or glass without a figure states that the water is potable, which is a claim about the water rather than a direction to a facility. A tap can be marked potable without there being anywhere to drink from it.
One marks a facility, the other states that water is potable.
Drawn from the visual attributes recorded for each symbol. Only traits the two records disagree about are listed.
| Trait | Drinking fountain symbol | Drinking water symbol |
|---|---|---|
| Built from | people and objects | objects, lines and dots |
| Drinking fountain symbol | Drinking water symbol | |
|---|---|---|
| What it says | Here is somewhere to drink | This water is safe to drink |
| Shows a person? | Yes | No |
| Marks a place? | Yes | Not necessarily |
| Its negation | Not usually drawn | Struck through: not drinking water |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Drinking water symbol — One marks a facility, the other states that water is potable. | Commonly confused with Drinking fountain symbol — One states that water is potable; the other marks a facility. They appear in the same buildings. |
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-08-01
Tertiary reference. Used for what a pictogram depicts and whether a standard covers it; where a standard is named it is reported by this source rather than read, so no meaning is typed `official` on that basis alone.
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-07-31
Tertiary reference. Used for what the symbol depicts, its shape-and-colour category, and any ISO reference number it reports. The standards themselves are paywalled and were not consulted, so nothing here is treated as an official definition.
Both are drawn as one continuous decorative stroke with a closed loop and a tail that crosses back over itself, which is why a description of the shape alone reaches both. The clef is far taller, spans a stave, and its spiral encircles one specific line — that encircled line is the note G, and it is the only reason the shape is drawn where it is.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
A building's assembly point is a safe place to stand once you are outside. A ship's muster station is a staffed step in a procedure: you are counted against a roll, briefed, and if necessary allocated to a survival craft, which is why it has a letter or a number and appears on your cabin door card. Both are green, both show grouped figures, and both are called an assembly point in ordinary speech — and treating a muster station as somewhere merely to wait is the misunderstanding drills exist to correct.
As punctuation the asterisk points at a footnote or marks a required field. In a filename pattern typed at a shell it matches any run of characters, including none — and the shell expands it against real filenames before the command runs, so the command never sees the pattern at all. That expansion is the part people are surprised by.