Try Sandwich emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Sandwich emoji mean?
A sandwich cut in half, for lunch and quick food.
Everyday and unglamorous. It names lunch and does very little else.
How to use 🥪 naturally
Lunch posts, packed meals and the running argument about what counts as one.
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 🥪
- 2017
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Sandwich was first defined as emoji in Emoji 5.0, dated 2017. One of the steady annual widenings of the vocabulary.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Added in 2017 as a triangular half with filling visible at the cut edge. Showing the cut was necessary, since a closed sandwich is two squares of bread.
- Today
How its use evolved
Lunch posts, packed meals and the running argument about what counts as one.
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.
Desk lunch again 🥪
Cut diagonally, as is correct 🥪
Made three at midnight for tomorrow 🥪
When to use it
Using 🥪 clearly
Lunch posts, packed meals and the running argument about what counts as one. It lands as sandwich emoji or lunch 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 sandwich emoji
What does 🥪 mean in a text message?
A sandwich cut in half, for lunch and quick food. Everyday and unglamorous. It names lunch and does very little else.
Is 🥪 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are sandwich emoji, lunch emoji, 🥪 meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🥪 look different on another device?
U+1F96A 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 sandwich 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 sandwich emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🥪 as emoji in Emoji 5.0, dated 2017. 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+1F96A | 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 | \1F96A | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F96A} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A5%AA | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F96A
- Category
- Food & Drink
- Also known as
- sandwich emojilunch emoji🥪 meaning
Keep browsing