There is no character encoded for use as a pause symbol, though various characters or combinations of characters may look more or less like a pause symbol, depending on font.
In a discussion in the public Unicode mailing list in 2005, a suggestion was made to use two copies of the U+275A HEAVY VERTICAL BAR character: ❚❚. But the adequacy of the result depends on font; for example, the glyph might have been designed so that the bars are too much apart. – The list discussion explains why a pause symbol had not been encoded, and this has not changed.
Thus, the best option is to use an image. If you need to use the symbol in text, it is best to create it in a suitably large size (say 60 by 60 pixels) and scale it down to text size with CSS (e.g., setting height: 0.8em on the img element).
23E9 ⏩︎ fast forward
23EA ⏪︎ rewind, fast backwards
23EB ⏫︎ fast increase
23EC ⏬︎ fast decrease
23ED ⏭︎ skip to end, next
23EE ⏮︎ skip to start, previous
23EF ⏯︎ play/pause toggle
23F1 ⏱︎ stopwatch
23F2 ⏲︎ timer clock
23F3 ⏳︎ hourglass
23F4 ⏴︎ reverse, back
23F5 ⏵︎ forward, next, play
23F6 ⏶︎ increase
23F7 ⏷︎ decrease
23F8 ⏸︎ pause
23F9 ⏹︎ stop
23FA ⏺︎ record
Power symbols from ISO 7000:2012
23FB ⏻︎ standby/power
23FC ⏼︎ power on/off
23FD ⏽︎ power on
2B58 ⭘︎ power off
Power symbol from IEEE 1621-2004
23FE ⏾︎ power sleep
Use on the Web:
A file must be saved using UTF-8 encodingwithout BOM (which in most development environments is set by default) in order to instruct the parser how to transform the bytes into characters correctly. <meta charset="utf-8"/> should be used immediately after <head> in a HTML file, and make sure the correct HTTP headers Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 are set.
Characters in the Unicode range are susceptible to the font-family environment they are used, application, browser, OS, platform.
When unknown or missing - we might see symbols like � or ▯ instead, or even inconsistent behavior due to differences in HTML parser implementations by different vendors.
For example, on Windows Chromium browsers the Standardized Variant suffix U+FE0E is buggy, and such symbols are still better accompanied by CSS i.e: font-family: "Segoe UI Symbol" to force that specific Font over the Colored Emoji (usually recognized as "Segoe UI Emoji") - which defies the purpose of U+FE0E in the first place - time will tell…
Scalable icon fonts
To circumvent problems related to unsupported characters - a viable solution is to use scalable icon font-sets like i.e:
If you want one that's a single character to match the right-facing triangle for "play," try Roman numeral 2. Ⅱ is Ⅱ in HTML. If you can put formatting tags around it, it looks really good in bold. Ⅱ is <b>Ⅱ</b> in HTML. This has much better support than the previously mentioned double vertical bar.
NOTE: apparently, these characters aren't very well supported in popular fonts, so if you plan to use it on the web, be sure to pick a webfont that supports these.
For a music player it can act as a companion for 'BLACK RIGHT-POINTING POINTER' (U+25BA) because they both share equal width and height making it perfect for a play/pause button:
<div style="font-family: Roboto">
Pause II: just two capital letters i (font dependent, needs sans serif)<br>
Pause <b>II</b>: as before, but bold<br>
Pause ll: two small letters L<br>
Pause ||: two vertical bars<br>
Pause ": quote<br>
Pause ᐦ: 0x1426 Canadian syllabics final double short vertical strokes<br>
Pause ‖: 0x2016 double vertical line<br>
<div/>