Try Snail emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Snail emoji mean?
A snail with its shell, for slowness, gardens and waiting.
Patient or exasperated depending on the sentence. Most often it is a complaint about speed.
How to use 🐌 naturally
Complaints about slow delivery, slow internet and slow mornings.
Animal emoji can be literal, affectionate or symbolic. People often use them for pets and wildlife, but also for personality traits, visual themes and private nicknames.
From standard to slang
The history of 🐌
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Snail 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 snail in profile with a spiral shell and both tentacles up, from the carrier set. The spiral is drawn flat to the viewer so the shell is unmistakable at any size.
- Today
How its use evolved
Complaints about slow delivery, slow internet and slow mornings.
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.
Tracking has not moved in three days 🐌
Broadband is doing its best 🐌
Sunday pace, no apologies 🐌
When to use it
Using 🐌 clearly
Complaints about slow delivery, slow internet and slow mornings. It lands as snail emoji or slow 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 snail emoji
What does 🐌 mean in a text message?
A snail with its shell, for slowness, gardens and waiting. Patient or exasperated depending on the sentence. Most often it is a complaint about speed.
Is 🐌 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are snail emoji, slow emoji, 🐌 meaning, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🐌 look different on another device?
U+1F40C 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 snail 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 snail 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.
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+1F40C | 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 | \1F40C | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F40C} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%90%8C | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F40C
- Category
- Animals & Nature Life
- Also known as
- snail emojislow emoji🐌 meaning
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