chain links
Objects
What it means when sent
Chains: being bound, and being linked; a separate broken-chain emoji was added later.
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
- chains
- What people call it
- chain links
- Code point
- U+26D3 U+FE0F
- Code points
- 2
2 code points joined together. That is why some devices need several backspaces to delete it, and why a character counter may score it as 2.
It needs a trailing U+FE0F to render in colour. Without it the glyph falls back to black and white — that is what gets lost when the emoji is copied and pasted.
Objects are mostly used as metaphors. 🚩 is not a flag but a warning sign, and 🔒 means private rather than a padlock.
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?
Chains: being bound, and being linked; a separate broken-chain emoji was added later.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it chains, code point U+26D3 U+FE0F. It sits under Objects.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
Only if the trailing U+FE0F comes along. Without it the glyph falls back to black and white.