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Two marks on the same underside, read as one assurance, meaning entirely different things — and only one of them is defined in law.
The glass and fork means the material is safe to touch food. It says nothing about heat, and a food-safe container can still melt or leach in a microwave. Wavy lines mean the maker considers it microwave-safe — which is not a certification, because no body defines that mark. If it matters, the manufacturer's instructions are the authority, not the symbol.
Both appear on the base of the same container and are routinely read as one assurance. Food-safe is about the material; microwave-safe is about heating it, and only the first is defined in law.
Drawn from the visual attributes recorded for each symbol. Only traits the two records disagree about are listed.
| Trait | Food-safe symbol | Microwave-safe symbol |
|---|---|---|
| Built from | objects | lines and dots, abstract |
| Food-safe symbol | Microwave-safe symbol | |
|---|---|---|
| What it claims | The material is safe in contact with food | The container withstands microwave heating |
| Is it defined in law? | Yes — EU Regulation 1935/2004 | No — not standardised by anybody |
| What it looks like | A wine glass beside a fork | Two or three wavy lines, drawings vary |
| If the mark is absent | Required only where suitability is not obvious | Tells you little — check the instructions |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Microwave-safe symbol — Both appear on the base of the same container and are routinely read as one assurance. Food-safe is about the material; microwave-safe is about heating it, and only the first is defined in law. | Commonly confused with Food-safe symbol — Both appear on the base of the same container. This one is about heating and is not standardised; the glass and fork is about the material and is defined in law. |
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-07-31
Tertiary reference. Used for what the mark depicts and whether a regulation defines it. Where a regulation is named, it is reported by this source rather than read directly, so no meaning is typed `official` on that basis.
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-07-31
Tertiary reference. Used for what the mark depicts and whether a regulation defines it. Where a regulation is named, it is reported by this source rather than read directly, so no meaning is typed `official` on that basis.
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.