Symbol for peace

The peace sign ☮

The circle with three lines was designed in 1958 by the British artist Gerald Holtom for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Holtom combined the flag-semaphore signals for the letters N and D, for “nuclear disarmament”, inside a circle. It was never trademarked, which let it spread to the civil rights movement, anti-war protests and 1960s counterculture until it simply meant “peace”.

Unicode encodes it as U+262E PEACE SYMBOL. The peace sign page has every code and shortcut for it, and the emoji form ☮️ adds a colour background on phones.

The dove and the olive branch

The dove is far older. In the Book of Genesis, a dove returns to Noah’s ark carrying an olive leaf, a sign that the flood was over. Greek and Roman writers already used the olive branch for truce and reconciliation. In 1949 Pablo Picasso’s drawing of a dove became the poster for the World Peace Congress in Paris, which fixed the image for the modern age. 🕊️ is the emoji version.

The V sign ✌

During the Second World War, Winston Churchill raised two fingers for “V for Victory”. In the 1960s, American protesters against the Vietnam War turned the same gesture into a sign of peace, and that meaning stuck. The text character ✌ and the emoji ✌️ are both on the victory hand page, with more gestures among the hand symbols.

Peace in East Asian writing

Chinese writes peace as 和平 (hépíng) and Japanese as 平和 (heiwa), the same two characters in the opposite order. 和 on its own means harmony and is a deeply valued idea in both cultures. The yin yang is sometimes used for peace too, although it really expresses balance between opposites.

The white flag 🏳️ means truce or surrender rather than peace itself, so use it with care. Many peace symbols also stand for liberty; see the symbols for freedom.