Fearful Face Emoji
Wide eyes and a pale forehead, showing worry or nervous anticipation.
Try Fearful Face emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Fearful Face emoji mean?
Wide eyes and a pale forehead, showing worry or nervous anticipation.
Anxious rather than terrified. It describes nerves about something that has not happened yet, which separates it from the scream of the fearful-scream face.
How to use 😨 naturally
Nerves before a result, and reacting to something with real consequences.
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 😨
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Fearful Face 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 pale blue forehead above a wide open mouth, using colour to drain the face. It is apprehension about what is coming, not a reaction to what happened.
- Today
How its use evolved
Nerves before a result, and reacting to something with real consequences.
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.
Results in an hour 😨
Sent it to the wrong list 😨
Presenting to the whole board 😨
When to use it
Using 😨 clearly
Nerves before a result, and reacting to something with real consequences. It lands as fearful face 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 fearful face emoji
What does 😨 mean in a text message?
Wide eyes and a pale forehead, showing worry or nervous anticipation. Anxious rather than terrified. It describes nerves about something that has not happened yet, which separates it from the scream of the fearful-scream face.
Is 😨 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are fearful face emoji, 😨 meaning, scared emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 😨 look different on another device?
U+1F628 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 fearful face 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 fearful face 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.
Easily confused
😨 compared with similar emoji
These sit close enough in meaning that people reach for the wrong one. Here is what actually separates them.
Fearful Face or Face Screaming in Fear?
😱 is the scream. 😨 is the moment before it — apprehension about something that has not happened yet.
Fearful Face or Flushed Face?
😳 is caught off guard. 😨 is worried about what comes next, so one looks backward and the other forward.
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+1F628 | 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 | \1F628 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F628} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%98%A8 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F628
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- fearful face emoji😨 meaningscared emoji
Put it in a message
When 😨 is the right choice
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