Slightly Frowning Face Emoji
A small downturned mouth: mild disappointment rather than real distress.
Try Slightly Frowning Face emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Slightly Frowning Face emoji mean?
A small downturned mouth: mild disappointment rather than real distress.
Understated disappointment. It is the smallest sad face available and reads as measured, which is exactly why it suits bad news that is not a disaster.
How to use 🙁 naturally
Minor bad news and reactions that would be overstated with a crying face.
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 🙁
- 2015
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Slightly Frowning Face 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
The exact mirror of the slightly smiling face, produced by flipping one curve. It is mild disappointment, drawn as minimally as possible.
- Today
How its use evolved
Minor bad news and reactions that would be overstated with a crying face.
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.
Sold out already 🙁
Rained the whole weekend 🙁
Two minutes late for it 🙁
When to use it
Using 🙁 clearly
Minor bad news and reactions that would be overstated with a crying face. It lands as slightly frowning face 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 slightly frowning face emoji
What does 🙁 mean in a text message?
A small downturned mouth: mild disappointment rather than real distress. Understated disappointment. It is the smallest sad face available and reads as measured, which is exactly why it suits bad news that is not a disaster.
Is 🙁 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are slightly frowning face, 🙁 meaning, sad emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🙁 look different on another device?
U+1F641 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 slightly frowning 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 slightly frowning face 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+1F641 | 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 | \1F641 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F641} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%99%81 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F641
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- slightly frowning face🙁 meaningsad emoji
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