Try Waving Hand emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Waving Hand emoji mean?
An open palm waving hello or bye, with motion lines to one side.
Friendly and lightweight. It naturally opens or closes a conversation, although repeated waves can make a goodbye feel more energetic or final.
How to use 👋 naturally
Opening a message, saying bye, or leaving a group.
Hand gestures can be direct and efficient, which makes them useful in quick replies. Their tone varies across cultures and age groups, so a short accompanying phrase can prevent ambiguity.
From standard to slang
The history of 👋
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Waving Hand 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
An open palm with motion lines to one side. The same drawing covers hello and goodbye, since the gesture itself does not distinguish them.
- Today
How its use evolved
Opening a message, saying bye, or leaving a group.
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.
Hi everyone, happy to be here 👋
I’m heading out now, see you tomorrow 👋
Welcome to the team 👋
When to use it
Using 👋 clearly
Opening a message, saying bye, or leaving a group. It lands as hi or bye 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 waving hand emoji
What does 👋 mean in a text message?
An open palm waving hello or bye, with motion lines to one side. Friendly and lightweight. It naturally opens or closes a conversation, although repeated waves can make a goodbye feel more energetic or final.
Is 👋 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are hi, bye, wave, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 👋 look different on another device?
U+1F44B 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 waving hand 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 waving hand 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+1F44B | 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 | \1F44B | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F44B} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%91%8B | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F44B
- Category
- Hands & Gestures
- Also known as
- hibyewave
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