Face Holding Back Tears Emoji
Wide eyes brimming with tears above a small smile, for being moved, proud or grateful.
Try Face Holding Back Tears emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Face Holding Back Tears emoji mean?
Wide eyes brimming with tears above a small smile, for being moved, proud or grateful.
Moved and grateful. It sits between happy and emotional, so it is the natural reply to good news about someone you care about.
How to use 🥹 naturally
Pride in someone, touching news and heartfelt thanks.
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 🥹
- 2021
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Face Holding Back Tears was first defined as emoji in Emoji 14.0, dated 2021. A release whose additions were quickly adopted as reactions.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Wide eyes brimming with tears above a trembling smile. It was added in 2021 and filled the gap between 🥺 and 😭 that people had been covering with one or the other.
- Today
How its use evolved
Pride in someone, touching news and heartfelt thanks.
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.
You passed! So proud of you 🥹
Thank you for this, it means a lot 🥹
They grow up so fast 🥹
When to use it
Using 🥹 clearly
Pride in someone, touching news and heartfelt thanks. It lands as proud emoji or emotional 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 face holding back tears emoji
What does 🥹 mean in a text message?
Wide eyes brimming with tears above a small smile, for being moved, proud or grateful. Moved and grateful. It sits between happy and emotional, so it is the natural reply to good news about someone you care about.
Is 🥹 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are proud emoji, emotional emoji, 🥹 meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🥹 look different on another device?
U+1F979 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 face holding back tears 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 face holding back tears emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🥹 as emoji in Emoji 14.0, dated 2021. 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+1F979 | 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 | \1F979 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F979} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A5%B9 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F979
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- proud emojiemotional emoji🥹 meaning
Put it in a message
When 🥹 is the right choice
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