Hypothesis

The Hypothesis icon represents the open-source web annotation platform enabling collaborative note-taking, highlighting, and discussion directly on web pages and PDFs. This symbol identifies the tool transforming how researchers, students, and educators engage with online content through social annotation and collaborative reading practices.

In educational contexts, instructors at institutions like Stanford and MIT use Hypothesis for collaborative close reading assignments where students annotate shared texts together. Researchers annotate preprints and working papers through Hypothesis to provide public peer commentary, while journal clubs use the platform for distributed article discussions enabling asynchronous scholarly conversation across geographic locations.

From a digital scholarship perspective, this icon signifies more than just highlighting - it represents the social layer for the web enabling public knowledge construction, transforms solitary reading into collaborative sense-making, and provides infrastructure for open peer review and transparent scholarly discourse. This distinction helps users recognize Hypothesis as fundamental infrastructure for participatory knowledge creation.

Hypothesis is one of 158 icons in Academicons, made by James Walsh and released under Open Font License. It is drawn on a 512 × 512 grid.

Sign in (it's free), then open Get icon, Install with shadcn CLI, and pick your package manager to copy the command. It adds HypothesisIcon to components/icons/academicons-hypothesis.tsx: one file, a size prop (24 by default) and every SVG prop, with no icon package.

Copy it as React (from Get icon, or the Code section): a typed HypothesisIcon component you paste into your project, with no package to install. Only the icons you import reach your bundle. It works in Next.js and any React app.

Open Get icon, then Copy as code, and pick Vue, Svelte, Angular, Solid or Preact; the Code section shows each one too. Every version is one self-contained component with the SVG inside, and SVG and data URL copies are there for plain HTML and CSS.

With Pro, the shadcn.io MCP server lets Claude Code, Cursor or any MCP client find the Hypothesis icon, or any of 158 Academicons icons, and install it from a prompt.

It's drawn in currentColor, so it takes the text color wherever you use it: a class like text-primary recolors it. To bake a color in, set one in Customize before you copy.

Set width and height on the component, or a class like size-6. It's drawn on a 512 × 512 grid, so it stays sharp at any size. Customize also sets the size it exports at, its padding and rotation.

Yes. It follows the text color, so with text-foreground (or any theme token) it changes with your light and dark themes. The icon is a vector, so it needs no separate dark asset.

Next to a visible label it's decoration: add aria-hidden="true" so screen readers skip it. Standing alone, as in an icon button, give the button a name instead, like aria-label="Hypothesis", so screen readers say what it does.

Yes. HypothesisIcon passes every SVG prop to the svg element, so <HypothesisIcon aria-hidden="true" /> works, and so do role="img" with aria-label, or a title child, when it carries meaning on its own.

Yes. Open Get icon, then Download file: SVG for code or design tools like Figma; PNG, WebP or JPEG at 512px; or an ICO favicon with 16, 32 and 48px inside. Each one uses what you set in Customize.

Yes. The Open Font License allows commercial use; the icons can't be sold on their own. The full terms are in the license, linked on this page.

No visible credit is required: Open Font License only asks that you keep the license notice if you ship the icons' source files. Icons installed with the shadcn CLI already start with a comment naming Academicons, James Walsh and the license.

Yes. Copying and downloading it is free, and the shadcn CLI install only needs a free account.

1 other library draws an icon called Hypothesis. The Other libraries section on this page shows each one, so you can compare them and open the one that fits your style.

Its tags are social, web, reading, annotation and highlighting. Each tag page lists the icons that carry it from every library, which is the quickest way to find a match for Hypothesis in another set.