gun emoji
Objects
What it means when sent
It used to be drawn as a real handgun; from 2016 the platforms redrew it as a water pistol, so sender and receiver may still see different pictures, and the official name is now water pistol.
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
- water pistol
- What people call it
- gun emoji
- Code point
- U+1F52B
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
Objects are mostly used as metaphors. ๐ฉ is not a flag but a warning sign, and ๐ means private rather than a padlock.
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 ๐ซ mean?
It used to be drawn as a real handgun; from 2016 the platforms redrew it as a water pistol, so sender and receiver may still see different pictures, and the official name is now water pistol.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it water pistol, code point U+1F52B. It sits under Objects.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes โ though every vendor draws it slightly differently.