Skull 💀

How to read it

💀 is U+1F480, named SKULL in the Unicode Standard. It was approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, and it is older than that: Emojipedia says SoftBank put it on early Japanese emoji keyboards in 1999, and Unicode’s mapping file for the Japanese carriers’ emoji lists it in the KDDI and SoftBank sets. Emojipedia describes it as figurative death, “dying from extreme laughter, frustration, or affection”. Dictionary.com’s entry says it is mostly used in lighthearted posts, for Halloween, scary things and the things “we joke will kill us, like a tough workout class or deep embarrassment”. The laughing sense has reached Unicode’s own data: the English keywords that phones search by for 💀 include “lmao” and “i’m” beside “dead” and “death”. Designs differ in the jaw: Emojipedia notes that Apple’s skull has a jawbone and some others do not. Around Halloween the literal meaning is back, and the skull’s longer history as an emblem of death is on the Halloween skeleton page.

Also searched as: 💀, dead emoji, skull emoji.

How younger people use it

Emojipedia’s Jeremy Burge wrote in February 2021 that it was “common wisdom on TikTok” that 😂, the laughing crying face, was for older people, and named the skull as the rising alternative: “Dying with laughter”, or in the phrase he borrowed from younger users, “I’m dead”. He noted that Apple’s 2017 differential privacy report had already placed the skull seventh, when no other public data had it near the top ten. NBC’s TODAY reported the same split in March 2021: Generation Z favoured the skull, “I’m dead” or “dying”, over 😂. Dictionary.com’s 2022 guide for millennials puts the two generations side by side. Millennials used the skull for playful exhaustion (“Cause of death: spin class 💀”); Gen Z answers a joke with a line of skulls meaning “I’m dying with laughter”.

The skull has since been overtaken. The Deseret News, reporting a New York Times analysis of Google’s Gboard keyboard data in August 2026, says 💀 rose rapidly in 2022 and 2023 and then dropped quickly; among teenagers it briefly outpaced 😭. 😭, the loudly crying face, was the most-used emoji of 2025.

What does the skull and crossbones emoji mean?

☠️ means death or danger: Dictionary.com lists poison, fear, Halloween and pirates. It is a different and older character, U+2620 SKULL AND CROSSBONES, from Unicode 1.1 in 1993, and Unicode’s chart gives it the alternative name “poison”. The difference to look for is the crossed bones under the skull; 💀 has none. Dictionary.com calls 💀 the one with “a more fun feel” and ☠️ the one used as a warning. The two overlap in the laughing sense all the same: Dictionary.com’s ☠️ entry gives “That joke was so funny, I’m dead” among its uses, and Emojipedia says the two are not to be confused, “though their applications may overlap”. On a chemical label, the skull and crossbones in a red-bordered diamond is the GHS hazard pictogram, not an emoji.