Clown Face Emoji
A mark of doing something dumb, most often self-applied after being naive, fooled or hopeful in vain.
Try Clown Face emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Clown Face emoji mean?
A mark of doing something dumb, most often self-applied after being naive, fooled or hopeful in vain.
Self-deprecating or cutting, with little in between. Aimed at yourself it admits gullibility; aimed at someone else it calls them a fool, which is a real insult.
How to use 🤡 naturally
Admitting you did something dumb, or calling out behaviour as performative nonsense.
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 🤡
- 2016
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Clown Face 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
Circus make-up: white base, red nose, painted mouth. Its modern use as an insult for self-deception has almost nothing to do with clowns.
- Today
How its use evolved
Admitting you did something dumb, or calling out behaviour as performative nonsense.
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.
Waited an hour for a table I could have booked 🤡
Believed the delivery window 🤡
Me, revising the wrong chapter 🤡
When to use it
Using 🤡 clearly
Admitting you did something dumb, or calling out behaviour as performative nonsense. It lands as clown face meaning or dumb 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 clown face emoji
What does 🤡 mean in a text message?
A mark of doing something dumb, most often self-applied after being naive, fooled or hopeful in vain. Self-deprecating or cutting, with little in between. Aimed at yourself it admits gullibility; aimed at someone else it calls them a fool, which is a real insult.
Is 🤡 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are clown face meaning, dumb emoji, clown emoji meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🤡 look different on another device?
U+1F921 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 clown 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 clown face 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+1F921 | 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 | \1F921 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F921} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A4%A1 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F921
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- clown face meaningdumb emojiclown emoji meaning🤡 slang
Put it in a message
When 🤡 is the right choice
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