Ghost Emoji
A cartoon ghost with its tongue out — playful and silly rather than frightening.
Try Ghost emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Ghost emoji mean?
A cartoon ghost with its tongue out — playful and silly rather than frightening.
Playful, not frightening. Its second life is as a pun on ghosting, so it now appears in dating conversations as often as at Halloween.
How to use 👻 naturally
Halloween, spooky jokes and, increasingly, references to being ghosted.
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, Ghost 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 white sheet with arms out and a tongue out, closer to a Halloween decoration than to anything frightening. The playful design is why it never means fear.
- Today
How its use evolved
Halloween, spooky jokes and, increasingly, references to being ghosted.
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.
Three great dates then 👻
Costume sorted for Saturday 👻
The office is empty and slightly 👻
When to use it
Using 👻 clearly
Halloween, spooky jokes and, increasingly, references to being ghosted. It lands as ghost emoji meaning 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 ghost emoji
What does 👻 mean in a text message?
A cartoon ghost with its tongue out — playful and silly rather than frightening. Playful, not frightening. Its second life is as a pun on ghosting, so it now appears in dating conversations as often as at Halloween.
Is 👻 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are ghost emoji meaning, 👻 meaning, halloween emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 👻 look different on another device?
U+1F47B 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 ghost 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 ghost 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.
Ghost or Skull?
💀 means something was funny. 👻 is playful about spookiness, or a pun on being ghosted — the two are rarely interchangeable.
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+1F47B | 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 | \1F47B | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F47B} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%91%BB | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F47B
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- ghost emoji meaning👻 meaninghalloween emoji
Put it in a message
When 👻 is the right choice
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