santa
People
What it means when sent
Santa Claus. A Western Christmas figure, so where that custom is absent he reads as mere winter decoration, and there is a separate female counterpart.
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
- Santa Claus
- What people call it
- santa
- Code point
- U+1F385
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
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 ๐ mean?
Santa Claus. A Western Christmas figure, so where that custom is absent he reads as mere winter decoration, and there is a separate female counterpart.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it Santa Claus, code point U+1F385. It sits under People.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes โ though every vendor draws it slightly differently.