Try Superhero emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
Meaning & usage
What does the Superhero emoji mean?
A figure in a cape, for heroics, rescue and thanking someone.
Grateful and a bit over the top. Thanking someone with it is warm rather than serious.
How to use 🦸 naturally
Thank-you messages, comic fandom and praising someone who saved the day.
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 🦸
- 2018
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Superhero was first defined as emoji in Emoji 11.0, dated 2018. The first release under the current annual numbering.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Added in 2018 with the supervillain, drawn flying with a cape. Unicode had to avoid every existing costume, so the design is a generic cape and bodysuit that belongs to nobody.
- Today
How its use evolved
Thank-you messages, comic fandom and praising someone who saved the day.
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.
Picked up the whole thing at midnight 🦸
Absolute hero, thank you 🦸
Film night, four in a row 🦸
When to use it
Using 🦸 clearly
Thank-you messages, comic fandom and praising someone who saved the day. It lands as superhero 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 superhero emoji
What does 🦸 mean in a text message?
A figure in a cape, for heroics, rescue and thanking someone. Grateful and a bit over the top. Thanking someone with it is warm rather than serious.
Is 🦸 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are superhero emoji, 🦸 meaning, hero emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🦸 look different on another device?
U+1F9B8 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 superhero 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 superhero emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🦸 as emoji in Emoji 11.0, dated 2018. 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+1F9B8 | 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 | \1F9B8 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F9B8} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A6%B8 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F9B8
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- superhero emoji🦸 meaninghero emoji
Keep browsing