Try Old Man emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Old Man emoji mean?
An older man with grey hair, used as the grandpa emoji.
Warm and a little teasing. People use it for their grandad and for themselves after a sore back.
How to use 👴 naturally
Messages about grandfathers, family and jokes about getting older.
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 👴
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Old Man 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 bald man with a white moustache on most platforms, from the carrier set. Like the old woman beside it, it relies on cartoon shorthand for age: glasses, grey hair and a stoop.
- Today
How its use evolved
Messages about grandfathers, family and jokes about getting older.
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.
Grandad's birthday today 👴
Asleep by nine, I am him now 👴
Back hurts from sitting 👴
When to use it
Using 👴 clearly
Messages about grandfathers, family and jokes about getting older. It lands as grandpa emoji or grandad 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 old man emoji
What does 👴 mean in a text message?
An older man with grey hair, used as the grandpa emoji. Warm and a little teasing. People use it for their grandad and for themselves after a sore back.
Is 👴 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are grandpa emoji, grandad emoji, old man emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 👴 look different on another device?
U+1F474 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 old man 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 old man 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+1F474 | 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 | \1F474 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F474} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%91%B4 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F474
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- grandpa emojigrandad emojiold man emoji
Keep browsing