birthday
Food
What it means when sent
The birthday itself; the candles stand in for the date in a greeting.
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
- birthday cake
- What people call it
- birthday
- Code point
- U+1F382
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
Food emojis narrow to the cuisine that drew them: ๐ is a rice ball and ๐ a rice cracker โ as different as a meal and a snack.
Using emojis
- Tap the character to copy it and paste it anywhere โ 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 (๐, ๐ ).
- At work, an emoji standing in for a sentence invites misreading. In some countries a bare ๐ reads as a brush-off.
- Putting emojis in a page title does not help search ranking โ 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 ๐ mean?
The birthday itself; the candles stand in for the date in a greeting.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it birthday cake, code point U+1F382. It sits under Food.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes โ though every vendor draws it slightly differently.