octopus
Nature and animals
What it means when sent
Eight arms, so it stands for juggling many things at once; in Korea and Japan it is also simply food.
- Code point
- U+1F419
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
Animals carry different meanings by culture. ๐ท is cute in one place and an insult in another; ๐ฆ sits between clever and sly.
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?
Eight arms, so it stands for juggling many things at once; in Korea and Japan it is also simply food.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it octopus, code point U+1F419. It sits under Nature and animals.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes โ though every vendor draws it slightly differently.