Smiling Face with Horns Emoji
A purple grinning face with horns: mischief, scheming or playful wickedness.
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Meaning & usage
What does the Smiling Face with Horns emoji mean?
A purple grinning face with horns: mischief, scheming or playful wickedness.
Mischievous rather than malicious. It signals plotting or flirtation, and it is the playful half of the devil pair.
How to use 😈 naturally
Pranks, plotting and flirtation with a knowing edge.
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, Smiling Face with 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
A purple face with horns and a grin, the traditional imp of European folklore. Purple, not red, which keeps it mischievous rather than genuinely evil.
- Today
How its use evolved
Pranks, plotting and flirtation with a knowing edge.
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.
Booked the window seat first 😈
Told her it was a quiet night 😈
Plan is chaotic and I love it 😈
When to use it
Using 😈 clearly
Pranks, plotting and flirtation with a knowing edge. It lands as smiling face with horns 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 smiling face with horns emoji
What does 😈 mean in a text message?
A purple grinning face with horns: mischief, scheming or playful wickedness. Mischievous rather than malicious. It signals plotting or flirtation, and it is the playful half of the devil pair.
Is 😈 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are smiling face with horns, 😈 meaning, devil emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 😈 look different on another device?
U+1F608 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 smiling face with 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 smiling face with 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.
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.
Smiling Face with Horns or Angry Face with Horns?
👿 is scowling and genuinely cross. 😈 is grinning and plotting, so only one of the pair is actually in a bad mood.
Smiling Face with Horns or Smirking Face?
😏 implies you know something. 😈 implies you are going to do something, which is a step further.
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+1F608 | 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 | \1F608 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F608} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%98%88 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F608
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- smiling face with horns😈 meaningdevil emoji
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