Waving Hand Emoji
An open palm waving hello or bye, with motion lines to one side. The hello and goodbye 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. The hello and goodbye emoji.
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. The hello and goodbye emoji. 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.
What does 👋 mean from a girl or from a guy?
The same thing either way: An open palm waving hello or bye, with motion lines to one side. The sender's gender does not change what the character means. What does change it is how well you know each other, what the rest of the message says, and whether either of you is being ironic.
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
- hibyewavegoodbye emojihello emoji
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