index finger up
Hands and gestures
What it means when sent
A forefinger pointing up. It needs a trailing U+FE0F for colour, and unlike 👆 the hand is drawn side-on rather than back-of-hand.
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
- index pointing up
- What people call it
- index finger up
- Code point
- U+261D 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.
Gestures split by country: the same picture is praise in one place and an insult in another. Each entry says where.
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?
A forefinger pointing up. It needs a trailing U+FE0F for colour, and unlike 👆 the hand is drawn side-on rather than back-of-hand.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it index pointing up, code point U+261D U+FE0F. It sits under Hands and gestures.
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.