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Three stacked horizontal lines that open a navigation menu.
Also known as: Hamburger button, Menu icon, Three lines menu, Navigation icon, Trigram for heaven
Three stacked lines open a hidden navigation menu. The form dates to the early 1980s Xerox Star interface and became near-universal with mobile web design; the food nickname came much later.
Opens a navigation menu that is otherwise hidden, most commonly on narrow screens.
Contexts: Software
Was designed for the Xerox Star interface in the early 1980s and returned to prominence with responsive mobile design; the 'hamburger' nickname is a later, informal coinage.
Early 1980s; widespread from the 2010s · Contexts: Software
Is criticised in interface design for hiding navigation behind an icon many users do not recognise as a control — a live debate rather than a settled verdict.
Recorded as an ongoing design argument, not as a finding. Evidence on discoverability is mixed.
Contexts: Software
Shares its Unicode code point with ☰, the I Ching trigram for heaven — an unrelated symbol that happens to be three horizontal lines.
The interface control and the trigram are distinct in meaning; only the glyph coincides.
Contexts: Software
Heads a family of dot-and-line menu marks that are conventionally distinguished by food names: three horizontal bars is the hamburger, three vertical dots the kebab, three horizontal dots the meatball, and a three-by-three grid of squares the bento. None of these names is standardised and all of them are widely understood among designers.
Contexts: Software
Related forms that are not treated as separate canonical symbols — see our variant rules.
Hamburger with a label
The three bars with the word MENU beneath or beside them. Adopted widely after usability testing repeatedly found that the bare icon was missed by users who had not learnt it.
Two-bar form
The same mark drawn with two bars rather than three, a stylistic simplification that carries no different meaning.
Three short horizontal lines of equal length, stacked with even gaps between them.
Both use stacked horizontal lines to stand for a menu; one is a physical keyboard key, the other a control on screen.