Try Dragon emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Dragon emoji mean?
A long, serpentine dragon drawn in the Chinese style, full body.
Big and dramatic. It suits games, fantasy and the Year of the Dragon, and it is a favourite in usernames for the same reason.
How to use 🐉 naturally
Fantasy, Lunar New Year and anything described as fierce.
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 🐉
- 2015
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Dragon was first defined as emoji in Emoji 1.0, dated 2015. The first release where Unicode versioned the emoji set as a standard in its own right.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A green dragon with a long body and short legs, following Chinese rather than European dragon art. Its companion 🐲 shows only the face, and the two are easy to mix up in a picker.
- Today
How its use evolved
Fantasy, Lunar New Year and anything described as fierce.
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.
New campaign starts tonight 🐉
Year of the Dragon 🐉
Boss fight took two hours 🐉
When to use it
Using 🐉 clearly
Fantasy, Lunar New Year and anything described as fierce. It lands as dragon emoji or mythical 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 dragon emoji
What does 🐉 mean in a text message?
A long, serpentine dragon drawn in the Chinese style, full body. Big and dramatic. It suits games, fantasy and the Year of the Dragon, and it is a favourite in usernames for the same reason.
Is 🐉 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are dragon emoji, mythical emoji, 🐉 meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🐉 look different on another device?
U+1F409 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 dragon 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 dragon emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🐉 as emoji in Emoji 1.0, dated 2015. 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+1F409 | 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 | \1F409 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F409} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%90%89 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F409
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- dragon emojimythical emoji🐉 meaning
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