Seal Emoji
A seal, for coastal wildlife and something that looks permanently pleased.
Try Seal emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Seal emoji mean?
A seal, for coastal wildlife and something that looks permanently pleased.
Round and cheerful. It is one of the easiest animals in the set to use as pure affection.
How to use 🦭 naturally
Beach and harbour photos, aquarium visits and soft affectionate posts.
Animal emoji can be literal, affectionate or symbolic. People often use them for pets and wildlife, but also for personality traits, visual themes and private nicknames.
From standard to slang
The history of 🦭
- 2020
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Seal was first defined as emoji in Emoji 13.0, dated 2020. A full release across faces, animals, food and objects.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Added in 2020, drawn lying with the front flippers forward and the head up. The pose is borrowed from every photograph people already had of them on a beach.
- Today
How its use evolved
Beach and harbour photos, aquarium visits and soft affectionate posts.
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.
Six of them asleep on the harbour wall 🦭
Watched one roll over for ten minutes 🦭
Coastal walk, best morning in ages 🦭
When to use it
Using 🦭 clearly
Beach and harbour photos, aquarium visits and soft affectionate posts. It lands as seal 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 seal emoji
What does 🦭 mean in a text message?
A seal, for coastal wildlife and something that looks permanently pleased. Round and cheerful. It is one of the easiest animals in the set to use as pure affection.
Is 🦭 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are seal emoji, 🦭 meaning, sea animal emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🦭 look different on another device?
U+1F9AD 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 seal 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 seal emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🦭 as emoji in Emoji 13.0, dated 2020. 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+1F9AD | 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 | \1F9AD | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F9AD} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A6%AD | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F9AD
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- seal emoji🦭 meaningsea animal emoji
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