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Two tick marks in the same applications, describing entirely different things.
Position tells you which. A tick inside a filled disc beside a name concerns the account; bare ticks beside a message concern delivery. One says something about who is speaking, the other about whether they were heard.
Both are ticks in a messaging interface. The verified badge sits in a filled disc beside a name and concerns the account; the read receipt is a bare tick beside a message and concerns delivery.
Drawn from the visual attributes recorded for each symbol. Only traits the two records disagree about are listed.
| Trait | Verified badge | Read receipt ticks |
|---|---|---|
| Built from | circles, lines and dots | lines and dots |
| Enclosing border | Sits inside a border | No enclosing border |
| Colour | blue and white | grey and blue |
| Verified badge | Read receipt ticks | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it appears | Immediately after a display name | Beside an individual message |
| What it describes | The account | The message |
| Enclosed in a disc? | Yes | No |
| What it certifies | Depends on the platform — identity on some, a paid subscription on others | Sent, delivered or read, depending on the app's scheme |
| Can it be switched off? | No | Yes, on most services |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Read receipt ticks — Both are ticks in a messaging interface. The verified badge sits in a filled disc beside a name and concerns the account; the read receipt is a bare tick beside a message and concerns delivery. | Commonly confused with Verified badge — Both are ticks in the same applications. These sit beside a message and describe delivery; the verified badge sits beside a name and describes the account. |
Neither mark means one fixed thing any more. What a verified badge certifies now varies by platform, and read-receipt schemes are per-application; a reader should not assume either without knowing which service they are looking at.
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-08-02
Tertiary reference. Cited for what a mark denotes in ordinary use, for a recorded origin, and for the existence of a disagreement. Never cited for a claim that a body defines a meaning.
Wikipedia · retrieved 2026-08-02
Tertiary reference. Cited for what a mark denotes in ordinary use, for a recorded origin, and for the existence of a disagreement. Never cited for a claim that a body defines a meaning.
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.