Emoji meanings

Older emoji with newer uses

The skull was approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, and Emojipedia says SoftBank first put it on early Japanese emoji keyboards in 1999. Dictionary.com’s 2022 guide says millennials used it for playful exhaustion, while Gen Z answers a joke with a line of skulls meaning “I’m dying with laughter”. That use has already faded: the Deseret News, reporting a New York Times analysis of Google’s Gboard data, says 💀 rose rapidly in 2022 and 2023 and then dropped quickly.

Unicode’s chart still names the moai MOYAI, a “Japanese stone statue like Moai on Easter Island”. ThePrint says Gen Alpha and Gen Z use it as a deadpan reaction, and that it climbed from 482nd in 2021 to 33rd in 2025. The wilted flower was recommended in 2015 for compatibility with MSN Messenger. Emojipedia’s David Doochin traced a TikTok trend, beginning in late February 2025, of using it in place of 💔 broken heart.

Two faces from 2021

The melting face and the saluting face were both approved in Unicode 14.0 in 2021, and reached iPhones with iOS 15.4 in March 2022. The melting face’s proposers, Neil Cohn, Jennifer Daniel and Erik Carter, wrote that it could “convey two conflicting emotions simultaneously”. Jay Peters’s 2019 proposal for the saluting face expected respect, homage and acknowledgement, and also “a sarcastic departure or goodbye”. In 2022, Dictionary.com says, it became a sign of solidarity among fired employees at Twitter, Meta and Amazon.

Look-alikes

☠️ skull and crossbones is a separate character, which Unicode’s chart also names “poison”. 🌹 rose is a different emoji too: Unicode’s chart points from the wilted flower to it, and Emojipedia says not to confuse the two. For the moai, Unicode’s English keywords are face, moai, moyai, statue, stoneface and travel, so the deadpan reading comes from the people using it.