Folded Hands Emoji
Please, thank you, or hands together to pray. Sometimes misread as a high five.
Try Folded Hands emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Folded Hands emoji mean?
Please, thank you, or hands together to pray. Sometimes misread as a high five.
Grateful, hopeful or prayerful. Most people read it as “please,” “thank you” or prayer, though some still use it as a high-five.
How to use 🙏 naturally
Gratitude and requests; widely used in condolences.
Hand gestures can be direct and efficient, which makes them useful in quick replies. Their tone varies across cultures and age groups, so a short accompanying phrase can prevent ambiguity.
From standard to slang
The history of 🙏
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Folded Hands 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
Two palms pressed together. Encoded as a gesture of prayer or thanks, and endlessly argued over as a possible high five, which it is not.
- Today
How its use evolved
Gratitude and requests; widely used in condolences.
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.
Thank you for your help 🙏
Hoping everything goes smoothly tomorrow 🙏
Could you send it before lunch? 🙏
When to use it
Using 🙏 clearly
Gratitude and requests; widely used in condolences. It lands as thanks or pray 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 folded hands emoji
What does 🙏 mean in a text message?
Please, thank you, or hands together to pray. Sometimes misread as a high five. Grateful, hopeful or prayerful. Most people read it as “please,” “thank you” or prayer, though some still use it as a high-five.
Is 🙏 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are thanks, pray, please, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🙏 look different on another device?
U+1F64F 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 folded hands 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 folded hands 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.
Folded Hands or Heart Hands?
🫶 is affectionate thanks. 🙏 is closer to please, thank you or prayer, and is read as religious by plenty of people.
Folded Hands or Clapping Hands?
👏 praises out loud. 🙏 is quieter and asks for something as often as it gives thanks.
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+1F64F | 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 | \1F64F | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F64F} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%99%8F | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F64F
- Category
- Hands & Gestures
- Also known as
- thanksprayplease
Put it in a message
When 🙏 is the right choice
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