Try Fly emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Fly emoji mean?
A housefly, for nuisance, spoiled food and buzzing around.
Irritating by design. It is one of the least affectionate animals in the set and is usually a complaint.
How to use 🪰 naturally
Summer complaints, kitchen annoyance and jokes about someone who will not leave.
Animal emoji can be literal, affectionate or symbolic. People often use them for pets and wildlife, but also for personality traits, visual themes and private nicknames.
From standard to slang
The history of 🪰
- 2020
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Fly was first defined as emoji in Emoji 13.0, dated 2020. A full release across faces, animals, food and objects.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Added in 2020, seen from above with translucent wings spread. The wings are drawn light and the body dark so the shape survives at keyboard size.
- Today
How its use evolved
Summer complaints, kitchen annoyance and jokes about someone who will not leave.
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.
One has been circling the light for an hour 🪰
Left the window open, regret everything 🪰
He is still in the group chat 🪰
When to use it
Using 🪰 clearly
Summer complaints, kitchen annoyance and jokes about someone who will not leave. It lands as fly emoji or housefly 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 fly emoji
What does 🪰 mean in a text message?
A housefly, for nuisance, spoiled food and buzzing around. Irritating by design. It is one of the least affectionate animals in the set and is usually a complaint.
Is 🪰 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are fly emoji, housefly emoji, bug emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🪰 look different on another device?
U+1FAB0 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 fly 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 fly emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🪰 as emoji in Emoji 13.0, dated 2020. 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+1FAB0 | 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 | \1FAB0 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1FAB0} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%AA%B0 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1FAB0
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- fly emojihousefly emojibug emoji
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