Try Onion emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Onion emoji mean?
A brown onion, for cooking, layers and crying in the kitchen.
Everyday and slightly comic. The crying joke is close to the surface whenever it appears.
How to use 🧅 naturally
Recipe posts, chopping complaints and jokes about having layers.
Food and drink emoji are most often literal, but they also signal plans, cravings, celebrations and shared routines. Context is especially important when a food has a slang meaning in a particular community.
From standard to slang
The history of 🧅
- 2019
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Onion was first defined as emoji in Emoji 12.0, dated 2019. A broad release, and the one that filled in several long-standing gaps.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Added in 2019 with papery brown skin and a green shoot at the top. The shoot is a small botanical lie that makes the shape read instantly.
- Today
How its use evolved
Recipe posts, chopping complaints and jokes about having layers.
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.
Chopping these is the worst part 🧅
Base of every good thing 🧅
I have layers, apparently 🧅
When to use it
Using 🧅 clearly
Recipe posts, chopping complaints and jokes about having layers. It lands as onion 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 onion emoji
What does 🧅 mean in a text message?
A brown onion, for cooking, layers and crying in the kitchen. Everyday and slightly comic. The crying joke is close to the surface whenever it appears.
Is 🧅 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are onion emoji, 🧅 meaning, cooking emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🧅 look different on another device?
U+1F9C5 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 onion 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 onion emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🧅 as emoji in Emoji 12.0, dated 2019. 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+1F9C5 | 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 | \1F9C5 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F9C5} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A7%85 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F9C5
- Category
- Food & Drink
- Also known as
- onion emoji🧅 meaningcooking emoji
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