Try Hedgehog emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Hedgehog emoji mean?
A hedgehog with its spines, for garden wildlife and prickliness.
Sweet with an edge. Most use is literal wildlife, with a smaller line in gentle jokes about bristling.
How to use 🦔 naturally
Garden sightings, autumn posts and describing someone who is defensive today.
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 🦔
- 2017
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Hedgehog was first defined as emoji in Emoji 5.0, dated 2017. One of the steady annual widenings of the vocabulary.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Added in 2017, seen from the side with brown spines and a small pointed face. The spines are drawn as short strokes, which is enough at this size to avoid a porcupine.
- Today
How its use evolved
Garden sightings, autumn posts and describing someone who is defensive today.
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 crossed the garden at midnight 🦔
Leave him alone, he is having a day 🦔
Put food out and it vanished 🦔
When to use it
Using 🦔 clearly
Garden sightings, autumn posts and describing someone who is defensive today. It lands as hedgehog emoji 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 hedgehog emoji
What does 🦔 mean in a text message?
A hedgehog with its spines, for garden wildlife and prickliness. Sweet with an edge. Most use is literal wildlife, with a smaller line in gentle jokes about bristling.
Is 🦔 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are hedgehog emoji, 🦔 meaning, garden animal emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🦔 look different on another device?
U+1F994 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 hedgehog 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 hedgehog emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🦔 as emoji in Emoji 5.0, dated 2017. 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+1F994 | 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 | \1F994 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F994} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A6%94 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F994
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- hedgehog emoji🦔 meaninggarden animal emoji
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