thumbs up
Hands and gestures
What it means when sent
Approval or acknowledgement in most of the world, but a rude gesture in parts of the Middle East and West Africa. Among younger users in several places a bare thumbs up increasingly reads as curt or dismissive.
- Code point
- U+1F44D
- Code points
- 1
A single code point. One backspace deletes it.
Gestures split by country: the same picture is praise in one place and an insult in another. Each entry says where.
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 ๐ mean?
Approval or acknowledgement in most of the world, but a rude gesture in parts of the Middle East and West Africa. Among younger users in several places a bare thumbs up increasingly reads as curt or dismissive.
QWhat is its official name?
Unicode calls it thumbs up, code point U+1F44D. It sits under Hands and gestures.
QDoes it survive copy and paste?
On most devices, yes โ though every vendor draws it slightly differently.