Try Rainbow emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Rainbow emoji mean?
Hope after rain, and a symbol of LGBTQ+ pride.
Colour, optimism and hope after difficulty. It is also a widely recognised symbol of LGBTQ+ pride, which may be the primary meaning in many contexts.
How to use 🌈 naturally
Pride posts, optimism and colourful things.
Nature emoji describe weather and places while also carrying emotional associations such as calm, hope, luck or change. They are common in captions because they establish a mood without a long explanation.
From standard to slang
The history of 🌈
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Rainbow 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 seven-banded arc. The bands are drawn in fixed order, so the same character carries both the weather and the flag meaning without any design change.
- Today
How its use evolved
Pride posts, optimism and colourful things.
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.
The sun came out after the storm 🌈
Happy Pride 🌈
This room needs more colour 🌈
When to use it
Using 🌈 clearly
Pride posts, optimism and colourful things. It lands as pride or colors 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 rainbow emoji
What does 🌈 mean in a text message?
Hope after rain, and a symbol of LGBTQ+ pride. Colour, optimism and hope after difficulty. It is also a widely recognised symbol of LGBTQ+ pride, which may be the primary meaning in many contexts.
Is 🌈 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are pride, colors, hope, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🌈 look different on another device?
U+1F308 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 rainbow 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 rainbow 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+1F308 | 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 | \1F308 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F308} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%8C%88 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F308
- Category
- Weather & Nature
- Also known as
- pridecolorshope
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