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Two upright bars that suspend playback.
Also known as: Pause button, Two bars, Double bar
Two vertical bars pause playback. The form is generally explained as a break in the signal — a gap where sound would otherwise be — rather than as a picture of anything.
Suspends playback without stopping it, so that resuming continues from the same point.
Contexts: Software
Is distinguished from stop, which ends playback and typically returns to the beginning — a difference of state, not of degree.
Contexts: Software
Is usually explained as coming from music notation — the double bar or the caesura, the two strokes that mark a break — rather than from anything mechanical. It entered tape-recorder controls in the mid twentieth century and passed from there into every media interface.
Is not the same as stop. Pause holds the position; stop discards it and returns to the beginning. Interfaces that offer only one of the two are making a decision about what happens when the reader comes back, and the symbol is what tells them which.
Contexts: Software, Electrical equipment
Related forms that are not treated as separate canonical symbols — see our variant rules.
Unicode DOUBLE VERTICAL BAR
U+23F8, encoded in the media-control range added for exactly this purpose.
Two short vertical bars of equal height, standing side by side with a gap between.
Both belong to the standard set of media transport controls.