Pensive Face Emoji
Downcast eyes and a slight frown: quiet disappointment or a low, thoughtful mood.
Try Pensive Face emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Pensive Face emoji mean?
Downcast eyes and a slight frown: quiet disappointment or a low, thoughtful mood.
Subdued rather than distraught. It is the most common way to signal a low mood without asking anyone to respond to it.
How to use 😔 naturally
Mild sadness, regret and messages where a crying face would be too much.
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, Pensive Face 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
Downcast, closed eyes with a flat mouth and lowered eyebrows. The whole face points downward, which is how it conveys a mood rather than a reaction.
- Today
How its use evolved
Mild sadness, regret and messages where a crying face would be too much.
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.
Wish I'd said something 😔
Long week, not a great one 😔
Missed it by one place 😔
When to use it
Using 😔 clearly
Mild sadness, regret and messages where a crying face would be too much. It lands as pensive face 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 pensive face emoji
What does 😔 mean in a text message?
Downcast eyes and a slight frown: quiet disappointment or a low, thoughtful mood. Subdued rather than distraught. It is the most common way to signal a low mood without asking anyone to respond to it.
Is 😔 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are pensive face emoji, 😔 meaning, sad face emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 😔 look different on another device?
U+1F614 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 pensive face 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 pensive face 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+1F614 | 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 | \1F614 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F614} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%98%94 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F614
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- pensive face emoji😔 meaningsad face emoji
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