football
Activities
What it means when sent
In the United States “football” means this ball; almost everywhere else football is ⚽. So the word alone plus this picture becomes a different sport depending on who is reading.
Official name vs. real use
The name Unicode gave it and the way people use it are not the same. If you searched your way here, the second one is usually what you were after.
- Official name
- american football
- What people call it
- football
- Code point
- U+1F3C8
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
Sport and game emoji mostly travel as metaphors. 🎯 is not a dartboard but “nailed it”, and 🎲 is leaving it to chance.
Using emojis
- Tap the character to copy it and paste it anywhere — it is text, not an image, so its size follows the font around it.
- Sender and receiver on different devices see different drawings. Apple, Google and Samsung each draw their own, and for some emojis that changes the meaning (🙃, 😅).
- At work, an emoji standing in for a sentence invites misreading. In some countries a bare 👍 reads as a brush-off.
- Putting emojis in a page title does not help search ranking — they are usually stripped from the result.
- Skin-tone variants are not listed here. Only the base form is, because the meaning does not change with them.
Common questions
Q. What does 🏈 mean?
In the United States “football” means this ball; almost everywhere else football is ⚽. So the word alone plus this picture becomes a different sport depending on who is reading.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it american football, code point U+1F3C8. It sits under Activities.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes — though every vendor draws it slightly differently.