Trigram for Heaven

On a screen it opens the menu; by name it is the Heaven trigram. The three stacked bars are the "hamburger" icon, so called because they look like a bun, a patty and a bun. On phones and narrow screens it marks the button that hides the site's or app's navigation. Usually that button is a drawn icon, but some sites drop in the text character ☰ instead, which is how the symbol ends up copied into messages and searches. There is nothing mystical about it there: tap it and the menu opens.

By its official name, ☰ is something much older. The bagua are eight signs made of three lines each, every line either unbroken (yang, active) or broken (yin, receptive). ☰ is the only one with three unbroken lines, so it is pure yang: Qián (乾), Heaven. In the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, which began as an ancient divination manual and became a philosophical classic, it stands for the sky, the creative force, strength, the father and the head. Doubled, it forms hexagram 1 ䷀, "The Creative", the first of the book's sixty-four six-line figures. Feng shui's compass arrangement places it in the northwest.

It is also a national symbol. The South Korean flag puts four trigrams around the red-and-blue taeguk circle, and ☰, read geon in Korean, holds the top-left corner, standing for heaven. Many Koreans know this character from the flag long before they meet it as a menu.

What does it mean if someone sends ☰?

Usually a pointer to a menu; among I Ching fans, Heaven and strength. "Tap ☰ in the corner" is a common way to steer someone to a hidden menu in a chat or a support message. In a conversation about divination, feng shui or Taoist ideas, ☰ is the Heaven sign, often paired with ☷ Earth to mean the whole cosmos or the male and female principles. It has no set emotional tone; it is not an emoji and has no standard coloured artwork, just the lines your font draws.