V sign ✌️ (peace sign)
The index and middle fingers raised in a V, palm facing out. It means victory or peace across most of the world, and in Japan and East Asia it is the usual pose for a photo. Made the other way round, palm inward, it is an insult in Britain and Ireland.
Easily confused with
How to read it
Unicode calls the emoji ✌️ VICTORY HAND (U+270C), and notes it is also scissors in rock, paper, scissors. The victory meaning dates from 14 January 1941, when Victor de Laveleye, the Belgian exile who ran the BBC’s Radio Belgique, proposed the letter V on air: victoire in French, vrijheid, freedom, in Flemish. The National WWII Museum describes resisters in occupied Europe flashing the sign to each other with their hands, and Winston Churchill making it at nearly every public appearance once he endorsed the BBC’s V campaign that July.
Also searched as: ✌️, peace fingers, peace sign hand, V for victory, victory hand emoji, victory sign, V sign in photos.
A gesture’s meaning changes from place to place and over time. These pages give the meanings recorded by the researchers, reporters and guides they cite, as of October 2026, and are reviewed yearly.
Palm out or palm in
Rick Steves writes that the V for victory is used in most of Europe as in the United States, but that with the palm facing the person making it, it is an obscene gesture in parts of Britain. Churchill, Richard Langworth writes, most often got it right, palm out. See the reversed V sign.
In photos in Japan and East Asia
Time reported in 2014 that the V-for-Victory or peace sign is as much a part of Asian portraiture as saying cheese is for English speakers, and set out the stories of how it got there. One credits Janet Lynn, the American figure skater who fell at the 1972 Olympics in Japan, smiled anyway, and flashed the V on media tours of Japan afterwards. Another points to the 1968 baseball manga Kyojin no Hoshi. Japanese media give the biggest role to Jun Inoue, singer with the Spiders and spokesman for Konica cameras, who is said to have made a spontaneous V in a Konica commercial. Jason Karlin, of the University of Tokyo, told Time the V was often recommended to girls as a way to make their faces look smaller and cuter, and Laura Miller, of the University of Missouri at St. Louis, recalled girls saying piisu, “peace”, as they made it in the early 1970s. In the 1980s it spread with Japanese pop culture to mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.
Look-alikes
The circle-and-lines peace symbol ☮ is a drawn emblem, not a hand sign: see the peace symbol.
Read next
- Next in Hand gesturesReversed V sign (two-fingered salute)The V sign made with the back of the hand towards the other person. In the UK and Ireland, and in Australia and New Zealand, it is an insult, the equivalent of the American middle finger.
- The same shape in Dashboard warning lightsLow coolant temperature indicator (blue)A blue thermometer light that shows the engine coolant is still cold.
More hand gestures
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with lines.
Sources
- Dingbats (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Version 18.0, Unicode Consortium, U+270C
- V for Victory: A Sign of Resistance, The National WWII Museum, New Orleans, The National WWII Museum, article
- V-Sign: Why East Asians Make Peace Signs in Photos, Time, 4 August 2014 (Wayback Machine copy), Time, article
- Understanding European Gestures, Rick Steves, read October 2026, Rick Steves’ Europe, introduction
- Churchill’s V-Sign (both ways) and the Peace Symbol, Richard M. Langworth, republished by The Churchill Project, Hillsdale College, article
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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