Three symbols were adopted for power, including the familiar one, the aforementioned enclosed circle, and the waning crescent Moon for sleep. The IEEE standardized these in IEEE Standard 1621.

Here’s what the symbol means and where it came from. The iconic power symbol, explained The power symbol, which can still be seen on nearly all modern PCs and laptops, originated in the 1950s.

To understand the power of symbols, you have to understand why symbols were created in the first place. For the first 470,000 years of human communication, speech was how we exchanged information ...