Try Elephant emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Elephant emoji mean?
An elephant with trunk and tusks, for size, memory and safari.
Large and good-natured. Its second use, the unspoken problem in a conversation, needs the words around it to be clear.
How to use 🐘 naturally
Zoo and safari photos, and the phrase about the elephant in the room.
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 🐘
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Elephant 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 grey elephant in profile with a raised trunk and one visible tusk, from the carrier set. The curl of the trunk is what makes the silhouette work at small sizes.
- Today
How its use evolved
Zoo and safari photos, and the phrase about the elephant in the room.
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.
Nobody is going to mention it, so 🐘
Safari on the second day 🐘
Never forgets a single thing I said 🐘
When to use it
Using 🐘 clearly
Zoo and safari photos, and the phrase about the elephant in the room. It lands as elephant 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 elephant emoji
What does 🐘 mean in a text message?
An elephant with trunk and tusks, for size, memory and safari. Large and good-natured. Its second use, the unspoken problem in a conversation, needs the words around it to be clear.
Is 🐘 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are elephant emoji, 🐘 meaning, safari emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🐘 look different on another device?
U+1F418 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 elephant 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 elephant 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+1F418 | 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 | \1F418 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F418} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%90%98 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F418
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- elephant emoji🐘 meaningsafari emoji
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