Elf Emoji
An elf with pointed ears, for fantasy, Christmas and pointy-eared characters.
Try Elf emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Elf emoji mean?
An elf with pointed ears, for fantasy, Christmas and pointy-eared characters.
Playful and fantastical. December pulls it towards Christmas, while the rest of the year it belongs to games.
How to use 🧝 naturally
Fantasy posts, December messages and gaming.
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 🧝
- 2017
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Elf was first defined as emoji in Emoji 5.0, dated 2017. One of the steady annual widenings of the vocabulary.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Added in 2017 with a group of fantasy characters including the fairy, genie and merperson. All were requested by gaming communities that had nothing to represent them.
- Today
How its use evolved
Fantasy posts, December messages and gaming.
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.
Character creation took four hours 🧝
On the shelf again 🧝
Ears are the whole costume 🧝
When to use it
Using 🧝 clearly
Fantasy posts, December messages and gaming. It lands as elf 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 elf emoji
What does 🧝 mean in a text message?
An elf with pointed ears, for fantasy, Christmas and pointy-eared characters. Playful and fantastical. December pulls it towards Christmas, while the rest of the year it belongs to games.
Is 🧝 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are elf emoji, 🧝 meaning, fantasy emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🧝 look different on another device?
U+1F9DD 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 elf 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 elf emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🧝 as emoji in Emoji 5.0, dated 2017. 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+1F9DD | 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 | \1F9DD | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F9DD} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A7%9D | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F9DD
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- elf emoji🧝 meaningfantasy emoji
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