Optical Disc Icon

A compact disc, and by extension any disc read by a laser.

An optical disc is a flat, shiny disc with a hole in the middle, read by a beam of light rather than a magnetic head: the CD for music, the CD-ROM for software and data, and later formats such as the DVD and Blu-ray. The symbol shows exactly that: a disc with its centre hole, drawn in one colour. In a document or list it can mark a disc drive, a copy on disc, or simply the medium itself.

The glyph is a survivor from the 1990s desktop. Webdings, a symbol font Microsoft shipped with Internet Explorer 4 in 1997, included a small CD icon among its hardware pictures. When Unicode 7.0 added about 250 pictographic symbols in 2014, most of them from Wingdings and Webdings, that icon became 🖸, with a standard code that any font can carry. Unicode's mapping record calls it Webdings item w-2056 and points to 💿, the emoji that already showed a disc.

That is also why its official name ends in "icon": it copies a computer-screen pictogram, like its neighbour 🖶, the printer icon, rather than a colourful emoji picture.

Why does it show as a box, or look different from 💿?

It is a text symbol, so your font decides whether you see it.

🖸 is not an emoji, so phones and chat apps don't swap it for their bright CD artwork; they draw it from whichever font covers it, typically a one-colour symbol font on a computer. Some phones and apps have no font for it at all, so the recipient sees an empty box or nothing. One font may draw a filled disc, another an outline: same character, different drawing.

If you want a disc that everyone sees in colour, 💿 is the character chat keyboards offer and apps widely support. 🖸 suits places where a quiet one-colour mark is wanted: a specification, an inventory list, a retro interface, or a font specimen.