Weather & Nature

Church Emoji

A church with a cross and steeple, for services, weddings and buildings.

Try Church emoji

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Preview
Ceremony at two, reception after ⛪
28px

Meaning & usage

What does the Church emoji mean?

A church with a cross and steeple, for services, weddings and buildings.

Plainly descriptive. It names a place, and the sentence around it supplies any feeling.

How to use naturally

Wedding posts, Sunday messages and architecture photos.

Nature emoji describe weather and places while also carrying emotional associations such as calm, hope, luck or change. They are common in captions because they establish a mood without a long explanation.

From standard to slang

The history of

  1. 2010

    First defined as emoji

    According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Church 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.

  2. Before the keyboard

    Its visual roots

    A simple building with a steeple and cross, from the carrier set of map landmarks. It sits alongside the mosque, synagogue and temple Unicode added later so that no one building stands for all of them.

  3. Today

    How its use evolved

    Wedding posts, Sunday messages and architecture photos.

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.

  • Ceremony at two, reception after ⛪
  • Walked past it every day for a year ⛪
  • Carols start at six ⛪

When to use it

Using clearly

Wedding posts, Sunday messages and architecture photos. It lands as church emoji or ⛪ meaning 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 church emoji

What does ⛪ mean in a text message?

A church with a cross and steeple, for services, weddings and buildings. Plainly descriptive. It names a place, and the sentence around it supplies any feeling.

Is ⛪ always positive?

Not always. Its usual readings are church emoji, ⛪ meaning, chapel emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.

Why does ⛪ look different on another device?

U+26EA 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 church 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 church 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.

Code formats for the Church emoji
FormatValueWhen to use itCopy
UnicodeU+26EAThe 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\26EAFor the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value.
JavaScript\u{26EA}A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression.
URL-encoded%E2%9B%AAPercent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests.

Reference card

Emoji details

Unicode
U+26EA
Category
Weather & Nature
Also known as
church emoji⛪ meaningchapel emoji

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