Ninja Emoji
A figure dressed head to toe in black, for stealth and doing things unseen.
Try Ninja emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Ninja emoji mean?
A figure dressed head to toe in black, for stealth and doing things unseen.
Playful and quick. It suits doing something quietly or arriving without warning, and it carries no menace at all.
How to use 🥷 naturally
Slipping in and out quietly, code deploys nobody noticed, and Halloween costumes.
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 🥷
- 2020
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Ninja was first defined as emoji in Emoji 13.0, dated 2020. A full release across faces, animals, food and objects.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A masked figure in black with only the eyes showing, added in 2020. It was drawn without a fixed gender, so every platform shows the same silhouette with skin tones available.
- Today
How its use evolved
Slipping in and out quietly, code deploys nobody noticed, and Halloween costumes.
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.
In and out before anyone noticed 🥷
Costume sorted 🥷
Snuck the fix into the release 🥷
When to use it
Using 🥷 clearly
Slipping in and out quietly, code deploys nobody noticed, and Halloween costumes. It lands as ninja emoji or stealth 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 ninja emoji
What does 🥷 mean in a text message?
A figure dressed head to toe in black, for stealth and doing things unseen. Playful and quick. It suits doing something quietly or arriving without warning, and it carries no menace at all.
Is 🥷 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are ninja emoji, stealth emoji, 🥷 meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🥷 look different on another device?
U+1F977 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 ninja 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 ninja emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🥷 as emoji in Emoji 13.0, dated 2020. 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+1F977 | 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 | \1F977 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F977} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A5%B7 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F977
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- ninja emojistealth emoji🥷 meaning
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