Sign of the horns 🤘

How to read it

Unicode calls the 🤘 emoji SIGN OF THE HORNS (U+1F918). Frederick Elworthy, writing in 1895 from Andrea de Jorio’s 1832 study of Neapolitan gesture, described it as the index and little finger extended, the middle and ring finger clasped by the thumb, and said Neapolitans named it the mano cornuta, the horned hand, because raised upright it looks like the head of a horned animal. Which meaning it carries depends on who makes it, where, and which way the fingers point.

Also searched as: 🤘, corna, devil horns, Hook ’em Horns, horns hand gesture, maloik, mano cornuta, metal horns, rock on hand sign.

Protection and insult in Italy

Elworthy recorded that a Neapolitan’s right hand was almost constantly in this position, pointing downwards like the hand charms made to hang downwards, as a guard against the evil eye; against a particular person, the hand was thrust out towards him. The same gesture pointed towards a man’s chin implied that his wife was unfaithful, an insult Elworthy called unpardonable in the Italy of his day. He also saw the hand made as a charm: Neapolitan women wore little horned hands on a necklace, much as others carry the horn-shaped cornicello. SmarterTravel’s guide on Boston.com, in 2014, still gave the unfaithful-wife reading for Italy, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Colombia.

Ronnie James Dio and the metal horns

Dio, the singer of Rainbow and Black Sabbath, told the Houston Press in 2003 that he learned the sign from his Italian grandmother: “She used to flash that sign all the time. It was protection against the ‘evil eye’ as well as a way to give it.” He called it a symbol of the bond between him and his audience, and added, “I didn’t invent it.” Melissa Wagner, co-author of A Field Guide to Gestures, told VOA the same year that rock fans make it at concerts to show an affinity with each other, while in other parts of the world it can mean a man’s wife is cheating on him.

Hook ’em Horns in Texas

The Handbook of Texas describes the same hand, facing forward, as the sign of support for the University of Texas at Austin and its Longhorn teams. A student, H. K. Pitts, came up with it in 1955 while making shadow puppets, because it looked like a steer’s head, and head yell leader Harley Clark introduced it at a pep rally before the TCU game on 11 November that year.

Look-alikes

Unicode lists 🤟 I love you hand sign as a separate character. The fig sign is the other hand gesture Neapolitans made against the evil eye.