Woozy face 🥴

How to read it

🥴 is U+1F974, named FACE WITH UNEVEN EYES AND WAVY MOUTH in the Unicode Standard and woozy face in Unicode’s emoji lists. It was approved in Unicode 11.0 in 2018 and belongs to Emoji 11.0. It came from the Emoji Subcommittee’s 2017 faces proposal (L2/17-244), which reviewed more than 400 popular faces from Facebook, Skype, WeChat and other sources; it gave this one the keyword “inebriated” and ranked it 23rd in Facebook’s data. Unicode’s keywords today are dizzy, drunk, eyes, face, intoxicated, mouth, tipsy, uneven, wavy and woozy. Dictionary.com’s entry says it means someone has had a few too many, or is tired, overly emotional or confused. Emojipedia gives intoxication, infatuation, dizziness and disorientation, and also bewilderment, irritation, exhaustion and wackiness.

Also searched as: 🥴, drunk emoji, face with uneven eyes and wavy mouth, what does the woozy face emoji mean, woozy face emoji, woozy face emoji meaning.

A face nobody could read at first

When it arrived on phones in 2018, Dictionary.com says, the woozy face “baffled the internet”, and people crowdsourced ideas for what it meant. Dictionary.com quotes The Verge’s Megan Farokhmanesh calling it a stand-in for “the drunk weirdo at the bar”. Once the novelty wore off, Dictionary.com says, people mostly used it for strong negative emotions such as stress.

How platforms draw it

Emojipedia notes that WhatsApp’s woozy face has its tongue hanging out, Toss Face’s winks and has rosy cheeks, and Samsung’s first design had a zig-zag mouth.

Look-alikes

😵 face with crossed-out eyes, an older emoji, has the keywords dizzy, knocked out and tired, but its eyes are crosses. 🤪 zany face, from Emoji 5.0, has one large eye and one small one, with the keywords crazy and goofy; its mouth is a wide grin, not a wavy line.