hongbao
Activities
What it means when sent
The Chinese hongbao: an envelope of cash given at Lunar New Year and at weddings. Korea and Japan have the same custom with different packets, and outside East Asia it reads as just a red envelope.
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
- red envelope
- What people call it
- hongbao
- Code point
- U+1F9E7
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
Sport and game emoji mostly travel as metaphors. ๐ฏ is not a dartboard but โnailed itโ, and ๐ฒ is leaving it to chance.
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
QWhat does ๐งง mean?
The Chinese hongbao: an envelope of cash given at Lunar New Year and at weddings. Korea and Japan have the same custom with different packets, and outside East Asia it reads as just a red envelope.
QWhat is its official name?
Unicode calls it red envelope, code point U+1F9E7. It sits under Activities.
QDoes it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes โ though every vendor draws it slightly differently.