Bat Emoji
A bat seen head-on with both wings spread, the closest thing to a Halloween animal.
Try Bat emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Bat emoji mean?
A bat seen head-on with both wings spread, the closest thing to a Halloween animal.
How to use 🦇 naturally
Halloween decorating, anything nocturnal, and staying up far too late.
Animal emoji can be literal, affectionate or symbolic. People often use them for pets and wildlife, but also for personality traits, visual themes and private nicknames.
From standard to slang
The history of 🦇
- 2016
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Bat was first defined as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. Part of the rapid mid-decade expansion beyond the original mobile set.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A bat head-on with both wings spread flat, a pose that keeps it legible at message size. It arrived in 2016, long after the pumpkin, so for most of emoji's history Halloween had one character and no more.
- Today
How its use evolved
Halloween decorating, anything nocturnal, and staying up far too late.
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.
When to use it
Using 🦇 clearly
Halloween decorating, anything nocturnal, and staying up far too late. It lands as halloween emoji or bat 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 bat emoji
What does 🦇 mean in a text message?
A bat seen head-on with both wings spread, the closest thing to a Halloween animal.
Is 🦇 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are halloween emoji, bat emoji, spooky emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🦇 look different on another device?
U+1F987 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 bat 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 bat emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🦇 as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. 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+1F987 | 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 | \1F987 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F987} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A6%87 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F987
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- halloween emojibat emojispooky emoji
Put it in a message
When 🦇 is the right choice
Keep browsing