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In Japanese, how to call a wait pointer?

I am talking about a computer mouse pointer which becomes a spinning wheel or hourglass (depending on the OS) when the application is busy processing something, or frozen:

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After discussion with 3 Japanese people, apparently ウェイトカーソル is acceptable but there might be something better.

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In Java, I've seen 待ち状態のカーソル –  Jesse Good Dec 5 '12 at 10:29
How would one translate "Spinning Beachball of Waiting"? That's what I call it. –  istrasci Dec 5 '12 at 18:48
That's an interesting question...I actually don't know if I've ever heard of it called that in English, just usually "the hourglass" or "the spinning beach-ball", etc –  silvermaple Dec 5 '12 at 21:23

1 Answer 1

According to Microsoft Language Portal, they call it “wait cursor” in English and “待機カーソル” in Japanese in the documentation for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, 2010, and 2012. I am not sure how popular this term is among users.

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I've certainly never heard of either "wait pointer" or "wait cursor" in English, and I consider myself very computer-literate, so I'm inclined to believe it's not very popular except amongst people who have read that documentation. (More flippantly, but equally sincerely, I imagine that in practice the Japanese at least use the same sort of language we do to describe it, such as "beach ball of death" or "oh for ****'s sake that stupid ******* egg timer ******* again".) –  Billy Dec 5 '12 at 19:50
@Billy: When it looked like an hourglass, it was definitely called 砂時計カーソル (hourglass cursor) or 砂時計アイコン (hourglass icon). I doubt that this name is used anymore in Mac or Windows because neither OS uses the hourglass shape by default. Now I might informally refer to it as something along 時間がかかるときに表示されるくるくる回るやつ (that spinning one that is shown when the computer is taking time). –  Tsuyoshi Ito Dec 5 '12 at 23:28

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