Face with Open Mouth Emoji
A round open mouth showing surprise, without the alarm of a scream.
Try Face with Open Mouth emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Face with Open Mouth emoji mean?
A round open mouth showing surprise, without the alarm of a scream.
Surprised without alarm. It is the neutral version of shock, useful when the screaming face would suggest the news was bad.
How to use 😮 naturally
Unexpected news, reveals and a reaction that is startled rather than upset.
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 😮
- 2015
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Face with Open Mouth 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 round open mouth with wide eyes, the plainest surprise available. Everything more dramatic in the set is this face with something added.
- Today
How its use evolved
Unexpected news, reveals and a reaction that is startled rather than upset.
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.
He resigned this morning 😮
It was in the folder the whole time 😮
They announced it with no warning 😮
When to use it
Using 😮 clearly
Unexpected news, reveals and a reaction that is startled rather than upset. It lands as face with open mouth 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 face with open mouth emoji
What does 😮 mean in a text message?
A round open mouth showing surprise, without the alarm of a scream. Surprised without alarm. It is the neutral version of shock, useful when the screaming face would suggest the news was bad.
Is 😮 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are face with open mouth, 😮 meaning, surprised emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 😮 look different on another device?
U+1F62E 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 with open mouth 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 with open mouth 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+1F62E | 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 | \1F62E | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F62E} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%98%AE | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F62E
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- face with open mouth😮 meaningsurprised emoji
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