laughing emoji
Faces
What it means when sent
The tears are laughter, not sadness; long the most-used emoji of all, it now quietly marks the sender as over thirty.
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
- face with tears of joy
- What people call it
- laughing emoji
- Code point
- U+1F602
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
The most misread group. ๐ญ is sent for joy more often than for sorrow, and ๐ for laughter more often than for death.
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?
The tears are laughter, not sadness; long the most-used emoji of all, it now quietly marks the sender as over thirty.
Q. What is its official name?
Unicode calls it face with tears of joy, code point U+1F602. It sits under Faces.
Q. Does it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes โ though every vendor draws it slightly differently.