Try Hamster emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Hamster emoji mean?
A hamster face with round cheeks, for pets and small cute things.
Small and affectionate. The wheel joke gives it a second, wearier use in work chat.
How to use 🐹 naturally
Pet posts, cheek-stuffing jokes and the wheel as a metaphor for pointless effort.
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 🐹
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Hamster 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 round hamster face with a pale muzzle and tiny ears, from the carrier set. It follows the same head-only template as the cat, dog and mouse faces beside it.
- Today
How its use evolved
Pet posts, cheek-stuffing jokes and the wheel as a metaphor for pointless effort.
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.
Cheeks full of the entire bowl 🐹
On the wheel again today 🐹
New pet, name still undecided 🐹
When to use it
Using 🐹 clearly
Pet posts, cheek-stuffing jokes and the wheel as a metaphor for pointless effort. It lands as hamster emoji or pet 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 hamster emoji
What does 🐹 mean in a text message?
A hamster face with round cheeks, for pets and small cute things. Small and affectionate. The wheel joke gives it a second, wearier use in work chat.
Is 🐹 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are hamster emoji, pet emoji, 🐹 meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🐹 look different on another device?
U+1F439 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 hamster 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 hamster 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+1F439 | 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 | \1F439 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F439} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%90%B9 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F439
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- hamster emojipet emoji🐹 meaning
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