Where the peace symbol comes from
The peace symbol ☮︎ was designed in 1958 by the British artist Gerald Holtom for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). He combined the flag semaphore signals for the letters N and D, for nuclear disarmament, inside a circle.
The sign was never copyrighted, so it spread freely. By the late 1960s it was the emblem of the anti-war movement and the counterculture in the United States, and today it stands for peace in general.
The peace hand ✌︎ and the dove 🕊︎
The V sign ✌︎, with the index and middle fingers raised, meant "victory" in World War II, popularized by Winston Churchill, and became a peace sign during the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Unicode still calls ✌︎ the victory hand. In Japan and much of East Asia it is also a standard pose in photos.
The dove 🕊︎ is a much older symbol of peace, going back to the story of Noah's ark, where a dove returns with an olive leaf. Pablo Picasso's dove drawing was used on the poster for the 1949 World Peace Congress in Paris, which helped make it a modern peace emblem too.
How to type the peace sign
In Microsoft Word, type 262E and press Alt + X to get ☮︎. In HTML, write ☮. On a Mac, open the Character Viewer with Control + Command + Space and search "peace". On iPhone and Android, search "peace" in the emoji keyboard to find ☮️ and ✌️.
For bios and captions, try ☮︎ ✌︎ 🕊︎ together, or add the peace hand in your own skin tone. Looking for something more uplifting? See hope symbols, the yin yang symbol or hand symbols.