Emoji meanings

About emoji meanings

These five pages cover emoji whose everyday use has moved some way from their names: skull 💀, melting face 🫠, saluting face 🫡, moai 🗿 and wilted flower 🥀. Each page gives the emoji’s Unicode name, its code point and the Unicode release that approved it, then what people use it to mean, with each reading credited to the dictionary, emoji encyclopedia, proposal or news report that records it. The pages put these sources together and say where they disagree. Uses change quickly, so the readings are as the sources recorded them in September 2026.

The faces section also has upside-down face 🙃, loudly crying face 😭, pleading face 🥺, face holding back tears 🥹, woozy face 🥴, face blowing a kiss 😘, thinking face 🤔 and clown face 🤡, and beside the moai and the wilted flower are eyes 👀, folded hands 🙏, double exclamation mark ‼️ and locomotive 🚂. The coloured hearts, from red ❤️ to grey 🩶, have a page each.

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.

Faces from other apps

Several faces came into Unicode from other services. Mark Davis and Peter Edberg’s 2014 list of additions gives Gmail as the source of 🙃 and 🤔, and the Emoji Subcommittee added 🤡 in 2015 for compatibility with Yahoo Messenger. 🥺 began as FACE WITH GLISTENING EYES, with the one keyword “begging”, in the subcommittee’s 2017 faces proposal. 🥹 was proposed in 2019 by Neil Cohn, a cognitive scientist and comics theorist, and Jennifer Daniel.

Tears and thanks

Unicode’s keywords for 😭 are bawling, cry, sad, sob, tears and unhappy, but Dictionary.com says people save its tears for “tremendous joy, hilarity, or some gushy sentiment”. In Google’s Gboard data for 2025, reported by the Deseret News from a New York Times analysis, 😭 was the most used emoji worldwide and 🙏 the fifth, and teenagers tend to use 🙏 where Gen X uses 👍. Whether 🙏 is a high five is an older argument. Unicode’s chart says it can indicate pleading, praying, bowing or thanking; Dictionary.com’s 2022 guide says it has been commonly used as a millennial high five; Emojipedia says it is rarely used as one.