Sleepy Face Emoji
A face with a bubble at the nose, drawn from manga shorthand for sleeping.
Try Sleepy Face emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Sleepy Face emoji mean?
A face with a bubble at the nose, drawn from manga shorthand for sleeping.
Drowsy and gentle. The bubble at the nose is manga shorthand for sleep, which is why it is often misread as a tear by people who do not know the convention.
How to use 😪 naturally
Tiredness, late nights and saying goodnight.
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 😪
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Sleepy Face was first defined as emoji in Emoji 0.6, dated 2010. That label is retrospective: Unicode applied it later to the early mobile core it inherited from the Japanese carriers.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A large bubble at the nose, the Japanese comic sign for a sleeping character exhaling. Western readers often mistake the bubble for a tear.
- Today
How its use evolved
Tiredness, late nights and saying goodnight.
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.
Two more hours of this 😪
Up since four 😪
Night, everyone 😪
When to use it
Using 😪 clearly
Tiredness, late nights and saying goodnight. It lands as sleepy 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 sleepy face emoji
What does 😪 mean in a text message?
A face with a bubble at the nose, drawn from manga shorthand for sleeping. Drowsy and gentle. The bubble at the nose is manga shorthand for sleep, which is why it is often misread as a tear by people who do not know the convention.
Is 😪 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are sleepy face emoji, 😪 meaning, tired emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 😪 look different on another device?
U+1F62A 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 sleepy 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 sleepy face emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 😪 as emoji in Emoji 0.6, dated 2010. 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.
Easily confused
😪 compared with similar emoji
These sit close enough in meaning that people reach for the wrong one. Here is what actually separates them.
Sleepy Face or Sleeping Face?
😴 is asleep, with the zeds to prove it. 😪 is fighting it, which makes it the better choice while you are still awake.
Sleepy Face or Yawning Face?
🥱 can be pointed — sent in reply it calls a topic boring. 😪 stays about the sender and carries no such edge.
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+1F62A | 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 | \1F62A | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F62A} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%98%AA | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F62A
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- sleepy face emoji😪 meaningtired emoji
Put it in a message
When 😪 is the right choice
Keep browsing