Ontario Road Sign Shapes and Colours
Learn how Ontario road sign shapes, colours and messages work together. Read the official illustrations alongside our verbal sign questions.
Start with the sign’s job.
The handbook describes regulatory, warning, temporary-condition, and information or direction signs. Regulatory signs give instructions you must obey. Warning signs identify hazards ahead. Temporary-condition signs cover situations such as road work and detours. Information and direction signs help you find routes, destinations and services.
Shape gives you a clue.
An octagon identifies a stop sign. An upside-down triangle identifies a yield sign. Warning and temporary-condition signs are usually diamond-shaped. An X-shaped crossbuck identifies a railway crossing. Use the shape together with the sign’s colour, symbol and written message; one feature alone does not explain every sign.
Read the colour and symbol together.
Warning signs usually have a yellow background; temporary-condition signs usually use orange. Many direction signs use green backgrounds. A green circle around a symbol means the activity shown is permitted or required. A red circle with a diagonal slash means it is prohibited. These are different uses of green, so read the complete sign.
Know what our sign questions do not test.
Our sign questions describe signs in words rather than showing the artwork, so they test whether you can reason from shape, colour and symbol. That is useful, and it is not the same as recognising a sign on sight. Visual recognition still needs the illustrations in the official handbook, so read the signs chapter alongside this practice rather than instead of it.