Try Sign of the Horns emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Sign of the Horns emoji mean?
The rock hand gesture, for rock music, metal and approval.
Energetic and cheerful. Outside music it just means awesome.
How to use 🤘 naturally
Concerts, guitar posts and saying something rocks.
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 🤘
- 2015
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Sign of the Horns was first defined as emoji in Emoji 1.0, dated 2015. The first release where Unicode versioned the emoji set as a standard in its own right.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Added in 2015 as the index and little fingers raised. The gesture was popularised by heavy metal singer Ronnie James Dio, and it means rock on almost everywhere.
- Today
How its use evolved
Concerts, guitar posts and saying something rocks.
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.
Front row at the gig 🤘
Nailed the exam 🤘
Metal Monday 🤘
When to use it
Using 🤘 clearly
Concerts, guitar posts and saying something rocks. It lands as rock hand emoji or rock and roll 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 sign of the horns emoji
What does 🤘 mean in a text message?
The rock hand gesture, for rock music, metal and approval. Energetic and cheerful. Outside music it just means awesome.
Is 🤘 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are rock hand emoji, rock and roll emoji, 🤘 meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🤘 look different on another device?
U+1F918 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 sign of the horns 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 sign of the horns emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🤘 as emoji in Emoji 1.0, dated 2015. 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+1F918 | 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 | \1F918 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F918} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A4%98 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F918
- Category
- Hands & Gestures
- Also known as
- rock hand emojirock and roll emoji🤘 meaning
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