Try Raising Hands emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Raising Hands emoji mean?
Celebration and relief — hands up in triumph.
Joyful relief and collective celebration. It feels more triumphant than 👏 and often marks a win, answered prayer or breakthrough.
How to use 🙌 naturally
Good news and group wins.
Hand gestures can be direct and efficient, which makes them useful in quick replies. Their tone varies across cultures and age groups, so a short accompanying phrase can prevent ambiguity.
From standard to slang
The history of 🙌
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Raising Hands 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
Both arms up with palms open and motion marks above. Originally a gesture of celebration in Japanese use, later adopted for praise and for surrender.
- Today
How its use evolved
Good news and group wins.
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.
We finally reached the target 🙌
The test results came back clear 🙌
Friday is here 🙌
When to use it
Using 🙌 clearly
Good news and group wins. It lands as hooray or celebrate 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 raising hands emoji
What does 🙌 mean in a text message?
Celebration and relief — hands up in triumph. Joyful relief and collective celebration. It feels more triumphant than 👏 and often marks a win, answered prayer or breakthrough.
Is 🙌 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are hooray, celebrate, yes, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🙌 look different on another device?
U+1F64C 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 raising hands 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 raising hands 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+1F64C | 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 | \1F64C | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F64C} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%99%8C | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F64C
- Category
- Hands & Gestures
- Also known as
- hooraycelebrateyes
Put it in a message
When 🙌 is the right choice
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