What are McDonald's famous yellow arches officially called?

McDonald's famous yellow arches are officially called the Golden Arches.

The arches began as architectural features of McDonald's restaurants rather than as a purely graphic logo. Architect Stanley Clark Meston designed a pair of large yellow arches for the company's early roadside restaurants in the 1950s. Their shape was intended to make the buildings visible to passing motorists.

In the early 1960s, the two arches were combined into the stylized M-shaped symbol now associated with McDonald's. The emblem gradually became more important than the building design itself and turned the arches into a globally recognizable corporate mark.

People sometimes call the symbol simply the “McDonald's logo,” but Golden Arches is the established name. The term also became a cultural shorthand for the company's restaurants and international reach, even where the buildings no longer use the original dramatic arch architecture.