holding back tears
Faces
What it means when sent
Eyes brimming but held back: moved by something touching, and also a cuter way to beg than 🥺.
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
- face holding back tears
- What people call it
- holding back tears
- Code point
- U+1F979
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
The most misread group. 😭 is sent for joy more often than for sorrow, and 💀 for laughter more often than for death.
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?
Eyes brimming but held back: moved by something touching, and also a cuter way to beg than 🥺.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it face holding back tears, code point U+1F979. It sits under Faces.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes — though every vendor draws it slightly differently.