pilot
People
What it means when sent
A pilot. It goes with travel talk, and because a plane is joined on it runs to four code points.
- Code point
- U+1F9D1 U+200D U+2708 U+FE0F
- Code points
- 4
4 code points joined together. That is why some devices need several backspaces to delete it, and why a character counter may score it as 4.
It needs a trailing U+FE0F to render in colour. Without it the glyph falls back to black and white โ that is what gets lost when the emoji is copied and pasted.
This one is joined with ZWJ (U+200D). On a device that does not know the sequence it does not merge โ you see the person and the object side by side instead.
Role emojis are mostly ZWJ sequences, so on a device without them you see a person and a tool sitting side by side instead.
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 ๐งโโ๏ธ mean?
A pilot. It goes with travel talk, and because a plane is joined on it runs to four code points.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it pilot, code point U+1F9D1 U+200D U+2708 U+FE0F. It sits under People.
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.