Face with Thermometer Emoji
A thermometer in the mouth — feverish, ill and unlikely to be going anywhere.
Try Face with Thermometer emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Face with Thermometer emoji mean?
A thermometer in the mouth — feverish, ill and unlikely to be going anywhere.
Unmistakably unwell. It is more specific than the mask, which can mean caution, so it is the clearer choice for actually being ill.
How to use 🤒 naturally
Sick days, cancelling plans and describing how the week is going.
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 Thermometer 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 thermometer held in the mouth with a flushed face above it. The instrument is the old mercury type, still drawn that way on every platform.
- Today
How its use evolved
Sick days, cancelling plans and describing how the week is going.
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.
Not making it in today 🤒
Temperature finally down 🤒
Whole household has it 🤒
When to use it
Using 🤒 clearly
Sick days, cancelling plans and describing how the week is going. It lands as face with thermometer 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 thermometer emoji
What does 🤒 mean in a text message?
A thermometer in the mouth — feverish, ill and unlikely to be going anywhere. Unmistakably unwell. It is more specific than the mask, which can mean caution, so it is the clearer choice for actually being ill.
Is 🤒 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are face with thermometer, 🤒 meaning, sick emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🤒 look different on another device?
U+1F912 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 thermometer 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 thermometer 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+1F912 | 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 | \1F912 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F912} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A4%92 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F912
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- face with thermometer🤒 meaningsick emoji
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