Graduation Cap Emoji
A mortarboard with tassel, for graduation, study and finishing a course.
Try Graduation Cap emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Graduation Cap emoji mean?
A mortarboard with tassel, for graduation, study and finishing a course.
Proud and celebratory. Summer posts are full of it, and study accounts use it all year.
How to use 🎓 naturally
Graduation posts, exam results and study updates.
Activity emoji name what is happening rather than how anyone feels about it. They work as compact labels for plans, results and hobbies, which is why invitations and announcements lean on them so heavily.
From standard to slang
The history of 🎓
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Graduation Cap 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 black mortarboard seen at an angle with a gold tassel, from the carrier set. The tassel is what fixes the orientation of an otherwise flat black diamond.
- Today
How its use evolved
Graduation posts, exam results and study updates.
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.
Four years, done 🎓
Results came through this morning 🎓
First in the family 🎓
When to use it
Using 🎓 clearly
Graduation posts, exam results and study updates. It lands as graduation cap emoji or graduation 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 graduation cap emoji
What does 🎓 mean in a text message?
A mortarboard with tassel, for graduation, study and finishing a course. Proud and celebratory. Summer posts are full of it, and study accounts use it all year.
Is 🎓 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are graduation cap emoji, graduation emoji, 🎓 meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🎓 look different on another device?
U+1F393 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 graduation cap 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 graduation cap 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.
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+1F393 | 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 | \1F393 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F393} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%8E%93 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F393
- Category
- Activities & Play
- Also known as
- graduation cap emojigraduation emoji🎓 meaning
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