What ⏾ means
It labels a sleep control: pause the device, keep it ready to wake.
You meet this crescent on the sleep key of some keyboards, on the stand-by button of some monitors and TVs, next to the status light of a sleeping PC, and in power menus. Using the control puts the device into a low-power state: the screen goes dark and most of the work stops, but your session is kept, so when you wake it everything is where you left it. That is the whole message of the symbol: resting, not dead.
The moon was chosen on purpose. IEEE 1621-2004, an American standard on how power controls should look and behave, made the crescent the official sign for sleep: it was already the most common sleep mark on office equipment, it reads as night and rest, and it keeps sleep visually apart from the familiar power sign. When the main power symbols were added to Unicode in version 9.0 (2016), the sleep moon came in with them so that manuals, labels and software could spell the sign as text instead of pasting a picture. Unicode itself notes the family resemblance to , the astronomical last-quarter moon.
Is ⏾ the same as or the off symbol?
No. ⏾ is sleep; is the general power button; is off.
The set works like this: marks a button that can switch power on, off or into standby, depending on the device; (a bar) means on; (a circle) means off; (bar in a circle) marks a single on/off toggle; and ⏾ marks sleep alone. If a laptop shows both and ⏾, the moon is the gentle option that pauses, while is the one that can shut down; exactly what each press does depends on the device's settings. Some devices also show a slowly pulsing status light while they sleep.
Plain technical labelling, as neutral as an on/off sign.
Sleep is not off: a sleeping laptop in a bag still uses battery and can warm up.
Part of collections
Don't confuse it with
3
Related characters
4
Combination ideas
4Worth knowing
- Before the IEEE standard, sleep was marked with moons on most office equipment, but also with the letter Z or “Zz”; the standard aimed to make every device's power controls speak the same language.
- Unicode added and ⏾ in one go in 2016, so signs seen on buttons for decades only became typeable text about ten years ago; the off circle was already there.
Questions people ask
3Does sleep turn the computer off?
No. Sleep keeps your open work ready and uses a trickle of power so it can wake quickly. Hibernate saves everything to disk and uses almost no power; shutdown closes everything. The moon ⏾ means the first of these.
What does the moon icon on my phone mean?
Usually Do Not Disturb, a bedtime or night mode, not this character. Phones draw their own moon icons for silencing notifications or dimming the screen; the idea is the same “resting” metaphor, but it is a different icon.
Why does ⏾ show as a box or question mark?
The font in use has no drawing for it. The character is still there; it just needs a font that includes this symbol, and coverage depends on the font and the app.
More like this
17
Collections with ⏾
10
How to type or find ⏾
- Also called
- sleep symbol · sleep mode symbol · standby moon
- Search it as
- sleep mode · crescent moon power · standby symbol · sleep button · low power symbol · moon power icon · ⏾
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⏾\23FECodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.