🤫
Smileys & Emotion

Shushing Face Emoji

A finger held to the lips, asking for quiet or for a secret to be kept.

Try Shushing Face emoji

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Preview
Party is a surprise, say nothing 🤫
28px

Meaning & usage

What does the Shushing Face emoji mean?

A finger held to the lips, asking for quiet or for a secret to be kept.

Conspiratorial and warm. It asks for discretion rather than demanding silence, which is why it suits surprises more than reprimands.

How to use 🤫 naturally

Surprises, confidences and marking something as not yet public.

Face emoji usually carry more tone than literal information. Read them alongside the words, the relationship between the people, and whether the conversation is playful, formal or tense.

From standard to slang

The history of 🤫

  1. 2017

    First defined as emoji

    According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Shushing Face was first defined as emoji in Emoji 5.0, dated 2017. One of the steady annual widenings of the vocabulary.

  2. Before the keyboard

    Its visual roots

    One finger raised to closed lips. The gesture is close to universal and needs no explanation in any language, which is rare in this set.

  3. Today

    How its use evolved

    Surprises, confidences and marking something as not yet public.

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.

  • Party is a surprise, say nothing 🤫
  • Not announced yet 🤫
  • Found the good bakery, keeping it quiet 🤫

When to use it

Using 🤫 clearly

Surprises, confidences and marking something as not yet public. It lands as shushing face 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 shushing face emoji

What does 🤫 mean in a text message?

A finger held to the lips, asking for quiet or for a secret to be kept. Conspiratorial and warm. It asks for discretion rather than demanding silence, which is why it suits surprises more than reprimands.

Is 🤫 always positive?

Not always. Its usual readings are shushing face emoji, 🤫 meaning, quiet emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.

Why does 🤫 look different on another device?

U+1F92B 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 shushing face 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 shushing face 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.

Code formats for the Shushing Face emoji
FormatValueWhen to use itCopy
UnicodeU+1F92BThe 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\1F92BFor the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value.
JavaScript\u{1F92B}A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression.
URL-encoded%F0%9F%A4%ABPercent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests.

Reference card

Emoji details

Unicode
U+1F92B
Category
Smileys & Emotion
Also known as
shushing face emoji🤫 meaningquiet emoji

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