Shark Emoji
A shark with its fin and teeth, for the sea, danger and the Left Shark meme.
Try Shark emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Shark emoji mean?
A shark with its fin and teeth, for the sea, danger and the Left Shark meme.
Threatening with a comic edge. Business chat uses it for someone ruthless, and the internet still uses it for dancing badly.
How to use 🦈 naturally
Beach posts, nature documentaries, business jokes and Shark Week.
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 🦈
- 2016
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Shark was first defined as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. Part of the rapid mid-decade expansion beyond the original mobile set.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Added in 2016 in profile with the dorsal fin and an open mouth. The proposal argued that the fin alone was already a universal signal, and the character keeps it prominent.
- Today
How its use evolved
Beach posts, nature documentaries, business jokes and Shark Week.
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.
Documentary and nothing else all weekend 🦈
He negotiates like this 🦈
Swimming out that far is a personal choice 🦈
When to use it
Using 🦈 clearly
Beach posts, nature documentaries, business jokes and Shark Week. It lands as shark 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 shark emoji
What does 🦈 mean in a text message?
A shark with its fin and teeth, for the sea, danger and the Left Shark meme. Threatening with a comic edge. Business chat uses it for someone ruthless, and the internet still uses it for dancing badly.
Is 🦈 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are shark 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+1F988 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 shark 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 shark emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🦈 as emoji in Emoji 3.0, dated 2016. 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+1F988 | 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 | \1F988 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F988} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A6%88 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F988
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- shark emoji🦈 meaningsea animal emoji
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