Try Zombie emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Zombie emoji mean?
A zombie with outstretched arms, for horror and being half awake.
Undead and comic. Most use is about exhaustion rather than horror.
How to use 🧟 naturally
Halloween posts, horror fandom and describing a bad morning.
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 🧟
- 2017
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Zombie was first defined as emoji in Emoji 5.0, dated 2017. One of the steady annual widenings of the vocabulary.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
Added in 2017 with green skin and arms raised forward. The pose comes from decades of film rather than from any single source, and every platform draws the same stagger.
- Today
How its use evolved
Halloween posts, horror fandom and describing a bad morning.
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.
Three hours of sleep and here I am 🧟
Series finale tonight 🧟
Whole office looks like this today 🧟
When to use it
Using 🧟 clearly
Halloween posts, horror fandom and describing a bad morning. It lands as zombie 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 zombie emoji
What does 🧟 mean in a text message?
A zombie with outstretched arms, for horror and being half awake. Undead and comic. Most use is about exhaustion rather than horror.
Is 🧟 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are zombie emoji, 🧟 meaning, undead emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does 🧟 look different on another device?
U+1F9DF 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 zombie 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 zombie emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 🧟 as emoji in Emoji 5.0, dated 2017. 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+1F9DF | 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 | \1F9DF | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F9DF} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%A7%9F | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F9DF
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion
- Also known as
- zombie emoji🧟 meaningundead emoji
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