This piece is a part of a joint project by type.today journal and a website focused on grammar and broader language issues, gramota.ru. In our first episode, we addressed emojis from a technical perspective, for the second episode, we asked our colleagues from Gramota to tell how emojis help and hinder communication, while in this one, we are going to share an incomplete list of emojis whose meaning is not obvious, confusing, or could change depending on the platform or region.

🗿

Moai
Unicode: U+1F5FF
Issue: A stone human figure from Easter Island was used as a poker face or a straight face for a while, but later it also started to mean disapproval — and is now sometimes used to react to a stupid message.

🫰

Hand with Index Finger and Thumb Crossed
Unicode: U+1F91E
Issue: This South Korean gesture, the Finger heart, is used to express love and gratitude. Due to the popularisation of Korean culture, it is now universally understood. However, this emoji might be confusing for people not familiar with it.

🤌

Pinched Fingers
Unicode: U+1F90C
Issue: Initially, this emoji was synonymous with an Italian gesture used to express bewilderment: Che vuoi? (What do you want?). Today, the 🤌 is also used to praise something or express a high opinion of something — in this case, the emoji meaning is related to the Italian word bellissimo (sublime, excellent, wonderful).

💊

Pill
Unicode: U+1F48A
Issue: When texting in Russian or English, for instance, this emoji is often used to point to the interlocutor’s inadequacy.

🐝

Honeybee
Unicode: U+1F41D
Issue: This honeybee emoji also serves as a marker of being a part of Beyoncé’s fandom, BeyHive (since it sounds like a beehive).

🫠

Melting Face
Unicode: U+1FAE0
Issue: Some time ago, it used to represent a person’s reaction to very hot weather, whereas today it might also mean depression or anxiety that makes it hard for them to solve problems.

🙏

Folded Hands
Unicode: U+1F64F
Issue: For the Japanese, the 🙏 emoji means ‘thank you’; for many other cultures, this is hands clasped in prayer. Muslims use the 🤲 emojis (Palms Up Together) to refer to a prayer. Assuming that the hands in question belong to two people instead of just one person, 🙏 might also mean high five.

🙈

See-no-evil Monkey
Unicode: U+1F648
Issue: The Mizaru monkey (見ざる), who sees no evil, is most often used to express awkwardness, shyness, or in the same way as a facepalm. One needs to keep in mind, though, that a 🙈 emoji sent to a black person can be interpreted as a racist slur. An alternative name for a group that indicates the speaker’s dismissive or depreciative attitude toward the group in question

🔫

Water Pistol
Unicode: U+1F52B
Issue: In certain emoji fonts, such as Tweemoji developed by Twitter, a water pistol is replaced by a real one. Make sure to check the typeface used by the platform you’re typing text for before using this emoji in it.

😇

Smiling Face with Halo
Unicode: U+1F607
Issue: While 😇 is regarded as a symbol of death in China, in Western cultures, it is used to refer to innocence.

💦

Sweat Drops
Unicode: U+1F4A6
Issue: This emoji is often used in sexting, typically to refer to squirting or an orgasm.

🍑

Peach
Unicode: U+1F351
Issue: In most cases, a person using this emoji means ‘buttocks’, often with a sexual connotation.

🐐

Goat
Unicode: U+1F410
Issue: In many languages, the word goat is part of an expression that means an unpleasant person (stary kozioł in Polish or Alter Ziegenbock in German). In modern English, the G.O.A.T. abbreviation (which stands for Greatest of All Time) sounds the same as the word ‘goat’.

🧢

Billed Cap
Unicode: U+1F9E2
Issue: In English, a cap emoji at the end of the sentence can change its meaning to the opposite. For example, Wow, the world’s really a safe place now 🧢. The cap came to be used in this meaning because of the word capping, which means lying in slang, with no cap being used to indicate that someone is being truthful or sincere.

🍇

Grape
Unicode: U+1F347
Issue: The word ‘grape’ sound is phonetically similar to the word ‘rape’, and the emoji 🍇is often used as a euphemism. Such euphemisms like this one are common largely because of social media moderation algorithms that discourage creating any kind of content directly related to the topics of sex and violence.

💀

Skull
Unicode: U+1F480
Issue: It is most often used to refer to a metaphorical death caused by things such as laughter, exhaustion, or irritation.

🌚

New Moon Face
Unicode: U+1F31A
Issue: This is the most unclear and confusing emoji, according to the survey conducted by gramota.ru. It is used to represent surprise, irony, a mild disapproval, or sometimes even flirting.

🤡

Clown Face
Unicode: U+1F921
Issue: It used to imply fun a while ago, but is now utilised as a reaction to irresponsible or inappropriate behaviour. For example, he arrived at the Gare du Nord, the train leaves from the Gare Saint-Lazare though 🤡.

👏

Сlapping Hands
Unicode: U+1F44F
Issue: In China, 👏 can be interpreted as a reference to making love since it resembles the pah pah pah sound (啪啪啪啪), while in Western countries, this emoji is used to express approval or endorsement.

🐴

Horse Face
Unicode: U+1F434
Issue: The DEA (the US Drug Enforcement Administration) believes that the horse emoji is used to replace the word ‘ketamine’ (as this drug is a horse tranquiliser). In 2023, the authority organised a mailing to the parents of teenage kids with a memo on what emoji code is used by drug dealers. However, situational drug users argue that in reality, most of the mentioned emojis are not actually used on the dark web.

🇧🇾

Flag: Belarus
Unicode: U+1F1E7 + U+1F1FE
Issue: The Belarusian opposition uses a different flag, featuring two white stripes and one red stripe. During the 2020 protests, Telegram even replaced the official flag emoji with this alternative. Nowadays, the opposition movement uses three coloured hearts or circles to refer to their flag, like this — 🤍❤️🤍.

🇪🇸

Flag: Spain
Unicode: U+1F1EA + U+1F1F8
Issue: Since many Catalans support the idea of the region’s independence from Spain, it is rather incorrect to use 🇪🇸 when talking about Catalonia. However, the actual Catalan flag is not available in Unicode.

🇹🇼

Flag: Taiwan
Unicode: U+1F1F9, U+1F1FC
Issue: On Apple devices produced for mainland China, the Taiwan flag is not displayed, normally being rendered as a missing glyph. It is displayed correctly on devices made for other regions.

P.S. We would advise against using flag emojis for language switchers — one language may be spoken in a number of countries, whereas one country may have more than one flag or several official languages.