Thinking face 🤔

How to read it

🤔 is U+1F914 THINKING FACE, approved in Unicode 8.0 in 2015 and part of Emoji 1.0. Like 🙃, it came from Gmail: Mark Davis and Peter Edberg’s 2014 list of new emoji gives Gmail’s THINKING as its source, and suggests it “Might have thought bubble instead of hand”. Platforms draw it with a hand: Emojipedia describes thumb and index finger resting on the chin under furrowed brows. Dictionary.com calls it the emoji equivalent of “hmm”, from a literal thinking sound to skepticism. Used in earnest it goes with a question or an idea, often beside 💭 thought balloon or 💡 light bulb; used rhetorically it casts doubt on a person or idea, or answers a statement on its own. Dictionary.com quotes New York magazine’s Max Read, who described it soon after its introduction as a “furrowed brow”, an “alarmed murmur” or “concerned skepticism”. Emojipedia gives its tone as earnest, playful, puzzled, skeptical or mocking. Unicode’s keywords are chin, consider, face, hmm, ponder, pondering, thinking and wondering.

Also searched as: 🤔, hmm emoji, thinking emoji, thinking face emoji, thinking face emoji meaning, what does the thinking face emoji mean.

Look-alikes

Emojipedia counts it among the few smileys with a hand, with 🤗 hugging face, 🤫 shushing face and 🤭 face with hand over mouth, whose hand covers the mouth instead of resting on the chin. The saluting face 🫡 holds its hand flat at the brow.