Lion Emoji
A lion's face representing courage, pride, leadership and the Leo star sign.
Try Lion emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Lion emoji mean?
A lion's face representing courage, pride, leadership and the Leo star sign.
Bold and encouraging. It reads as courage before a challenge, and as a straightforward marker for Leo in horoscope posts.
How to use 🦁 naturally
Encouragement before something daunting, team mascots and horoscopes.
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 🦁
- 2015
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Lion was first defined as emoji in Emoji 1.0, dated 2015. The first release where Unicode versioned the emoji set as a standard in its own right.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A lion head surrounded by a full mane. The mane is the entire silhouette, which is why the face beneath it can be drawn so simply.
- Today
How its use evolved
Encouragement before something daunting, team mascots and horoscopes.
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.
Go get it, you've prepared 🦁
Leo season begins 🦁
Second half, come on 🦁
When to use it
Using 🦁 clearly
Encouragement before something daunting, team mascots and horoscopes. It lands as lion 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 lion emoji
What does 🦁 mean in a text message?
A lion's face representing courage, pride, leadership and the Leo star sign. Bold and encouraging. It reads as courage before a challenge, and as a straightforward marker for Leo in horoscope posts.
Is 🦁 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are lion emoji meaning, 🦁 meaning, leo emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🦁 look different on another device?
U+1F981 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 lion 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 lion emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🦁 as emoji in Emoji 1.0, dated 2015. 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+1F981 | 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 | \1F981 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F981} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A6%81 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F981
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- lion emoji meaning🦁 meaningleo emoji
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