Try Astonished Face emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Astonished Face emoji mean?
Wide eyes and an open mouth, for genuine surprise.
Surprised without the drama of 😱. It is the face for real news rather than for a joke about it.
How to use 😲 naturally
Reacting to news, plot twists and anything you did not see coming.
Face emoji usually carry more tone than literal information. Read them alongside the words, the relationship between the people, and whether the conversation is playful, formal or tense.
From standard to slang
The history of 😲
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Astonished Face was first defined as emoji in Emoji 0.6, dated 2010. That label is retrospective: Unicode applied it later to the early mobile core it inherited from the Japanese carriers.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A round face with an oval mouth and raised brows, from the carrier set. The mouth is drawn as a tall oval, which is the one detail separating surprise from a yawn.
- Today
How its use evolved
Reacting to news, plot twists and anything you did not see coming.
Dates follow Unicode’s official Emoji Versions chart. Versions before Emoji 1.0 are labelled retrospectively. See the history of emoji.
In conversation
Examples of 😲 in messages
These examples show the emoji in complete messages, where the words make its intended tone easier to read.
You did what 😲
Opened the email and had to sit down 😲
Ending came out of nowhere 😲
When to use it
Using 😲 clearly
Reacting to news, plot twists and anything you did not see coming. It lands as astonished emoji or shocked emoji when the rest of the message supports that reading, and it is the surrounding words that do the deciding — so in a sensitive, professional or cross-cultural conversation, say the thing outright as well.
Common questions
About the astonished face emoji
What does 😲 mean in a text message?
Wide eyes and an open mouth, for genuine surprise. Surprised without the drama of 😱. It is the face for real news rather than for a joke about it.
Is 😲 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are astonished emoji, shocked emoji, 😲 meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 😲 look different on another device?
U+1F632 identifies the emoji; the picture is a font, drawn separately by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung. Only the artwork changes, never the character.
How do I copy and paste the astonished face emoji?
Use the copy button at the top of this page. 😲 is a character, not an image, so it pastes into messages, captions and filenames as ordinary text.
When was the astonished face emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 😲 as emoji in Emoji 0.6, dated 2010. Early emoji version numbers can be retrospective, so this date describes its place in the standardised emoji set rather than the first-ever appearance of the underlying symbol.
For developers
😲 in code
Every value below is generated from the character itself, so it stays correct even where a file encoding cannot hold the emoji directly.
| Format | Value | When to use it | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U+1F632 | The standard reference. Use it to search a character map or a spec. | |
| HTML (hex) | 😲 | For HTML and XML. Safe in files that are not saved as UTF-8. | |
| HTML (decimal) | 😲 | The same reference in decimal. Both render identically. | |
| CSS | \1F632 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F632} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%98%B2 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F632
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- astonished emojishocked emoji😲 meaning
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