Try Thinking Face emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Thinking Face emoji mean?
Pondering, doubting or quietly questioning something.
Curious, doubtful or analytical depending on the sentence. It can signal genuine consideration, but after a bold claim it often reads as playful skepticism.
How to use 🤔 naturally
Adds skepticism to a statement, or marks genuine deliberation.
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, Thinking 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
A hand supporting the chin, borrowed from the pose everyone recognises as deliberation. The raised eyebrow is what tilts it from thought into doubt.
- Today
How its use evolved
Adds skepticism to a statement, or marks genuine deliberation.
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.
That number seems a little high 🤔
Which option would be easier to maintain? 🤔
You said you were going to bed two hours ago 🤔
When to use it
Using 🤔 clearly
Adds skepticism to a statement, or marks genuine deliberation. It lands as hmm or doubt 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 thinking face emoji
What does 🤔 mean in a text message?
Pondering, doubting or quietly questioning something. Curious, doubtful or analytical depending on the sentence. It can signal genuine consideration, but after a bold claim it often reads as playful skepticism.
Is 🤔 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are hmm, doubt, consider, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🤔 look different on another device?
U+1F914 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 thinking 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 thinking 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+1F914 | 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 | \1F914 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F914} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A4%94 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F914
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- hmmdoubtconsider
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