Power symbol

Also called standby, IEC 60417-5009, ⏻

IEC 60417, the standby form standardized in the 1970s

Power symbol meaning

The power symbol people tap is IEC 60417-5009: a line breaking a circle, a 1 inside a broken 0. It means standby, not off. A full circle is off. A short line is on. The combined on-off mark is a fourth sign. None of them is ancient.

⏻U+23FB

A one breaking a zero. It means standby, not off.

The name. Power here is the engineer’s word for the state of a machine, not political power and not a occult force. Standby is the standard’s own word for the middle condition. The circles and lines are binary digits drawn as a picture.

Download drawing

Where it comes from

The International Electrotechnical Commission collects graphical symbols for equipment in IEC 60417. Four of them got tangled in ordinary speech. A vertical line means power on, because a 1 in binary is the on state. An unbroken circle means power off, because a 0 is the off state. A line rising out of a broken circle means standby: the machine is not off, and it is not fully on. That one is 60417-5009, and it is the mark on most buttons that people call the power button. Unicode encodes it as POWER SYMBOL, U+23FB, ⏻. A separate character, U+23FC ⏼, is the power on-off symbol, the line and the circle side by side or combined as a toggle, IEC 60417-5010. U+23FD ⏽ is the power-on line. A heavy circle, U+2B58 ⭘, is sometimes used to draw the off state. It is a geometric character, not itself the IEC number. The IEEE had pushed the binary reading: 1 and 0 are already the words the machine uses. Putting them on the button saves a language. The misreading is widespread and simple. People say the button turns the device off. On many devices it puts the device to sleep. The circle is open because the 0 is broken by the 1. If the circle were closed, the standard would be saying off.

Modern

Four marks, one loose name

“The power symbol” in speech is usually standby. In the catalog it is one number among others. On is a line. Off is a circle. Standby is the line in the broken circle. On-off is the pair used when one control does both. A manual that uses the words interchangeably is how machines get left drawing current. The lexicon keeps the four apart because the difference is the whole content of the sign. There is no earlier myth to recover. The content is the standard.

Modern

Binary, drawn large

Leibniz’s 0 and 1 are the ancestors of the digits, not of the button. The button is a twentieth-century application. It belongs with the binary page as a later reader of those two digits, the way a plaque sent into space is a later reader of the same digits. The Neptune trident is a different resemblance and a different page. Do not fold the standby mark into the planet. A circle and a line are cheap shapes. Cheap is why the standard had to number them.

In popular culture

tv · 2012

Revolution (NBC)

The title's second 'o' is the standby symbol, for a series premised on the power going out.

IEC 60417-5009 was coined for standby, not off.

Source

music · 1998

Garbage, 'Push It'

The symbol is the record-sleeve art.

The symbol is the record-sleeve art, which is a later reading of the mark.

Source

other · 2010

NYC Health Department condoms

The city put the symbol on its condom wrappers.

The city put the symbol on its condom wrappers, which is a later reading of the mark.

Source

brand · c. 2002

Gateway logo

Used in Gateway's corporate logo.

Used in Gateway's corporate logo, which is a later reading of the mark.

Source

other · 2019

Volkswagen UK human power symbol

786 employees formed the world's largest human power symbol at Millbrook.

786 employees formed the world's largest human power symbol at Millbrook, which is a later reading of the mark.

Source

Worth knowing

Invented 1973 to mean standby; only about 30 years later did a committee recommend reading it as 'power'. MoMA called the drift a brilliant result of evolving technology. Source
Terence Eden's 2015 campaign got ⏻ ⏼ ⏽ ⭘ into Unicode 9.0. Source
IEEE 1621 (2004) proposed a crescent moon for sleep. Source

Questions

What does the Power symbol mean?

How do I type the Power symbol?

The character is ⏻ (U+23FB).

Why does Revolution use the power symbol?

The title's second 'o' is the standby symbol, for a series premised on the power going out. IEC 60417-5009 was coined for standby, not off.

Near this

Sources

Named when the entry depends on a text, a date, or a standard. Catalog numbers are not invented.

Your margin

Private. It stays in this browser and never joins the canon.

symbol.wiki, edited as Sigilla. Last reviewed 20 October 2026. A reading of public tradition, not a ruling.