The Skull emoji (💀) is an emoji depicting a human skull. It was added to Unicode's Emoticon block in October 2010. Originally representing death or goth subculture, by the early 2020s Generation Z started using the skull emoji to express joy or happiness, as well as laughter. It replaced Face with Tears of Joy emoji, which they associated with older generations.
Development
An emoji depicting a skull was originally included in the proprietary emoji sets from SoftBank Mobile and au by KDDI. Using these sets as a source,[1] the Unicode Consortium included the skull emoji in their Unicode 6.0 standard, released in October 2010.[2] Prior to that, the skull emoji was available for iPhone users in Japan, initially using a specific Private Use Area for compatibility with SoftBank's set.[3] Following the discovery that installing Japanese apps unlocked the emoji keyboard, Apple released emoji support worldwide in 2011.[4]
| Preview | 💀 | |
|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | SKULL | |
| Encodings | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 128128 | U+1F480 |
| UTF-8 | 240 159 146 128 | F0 9F 92 80 |
| UTF-16 | 55357 56448 | D83D DC80 |
| GB 18030 | 148 57 214 50 | 94 39 D6 32 |
| Numeric character reference | 💀 |
💀 |
| Shift JIS (au by KDDI)[5] | 246 209 | F6 D1 |
| Shift JIS (SoftBank 3G)[5] | 247 92 | F7 5C |
| 7-bit JIS (au by KDDI)[1] | 118 83 | 76 53 |
| Emoji shortcode[6] | :skull: | |
| Google name (pre-Unicode)[7] | SKULL | |
| CLDR text-to-speech name[8] | skull | |
| Google substitute string[7] | [どくろ] | |
Evolution of meaning and usage
Throughout the 2010s, the skull emoji retained its original meaning, symbolizing death or goth subculture.[9][10] In 2016, Wired reported that people were more likely to use the skull emoji when they posted online about their phones being broken, signifying that they are "socially dead".[11] The emoji had limited popularity, ranking 92nd among the most used emojis on Twitter in 2015.[12] It reached the top 10 in the United States by 2019, but remained outside the top 50 in other countries.[13] In the early 2020s, the skull emoji was popularized by Generation Z, the demographic cohort of people born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s, who started using it as a replacement for the phrases "I'm dead" or "I'm dying" – short for "I'm dying of laughter" – to express joy or happiness,[14] as well as laughter.[15] They viewed Face with Tears of Joy emoji, the emoji previously used to convey these emotions, as "uncool",[16] due to its association with older generations.[15] Before this meaning of the skull emoji became popular, in 2015, the ghost emoji (👻) was used instead.[17]
Reception
Adam Aleksic of The Washington Post viewed the skull emoji as a symbol that represents humor or irony and believed that it became a punctuation mark. Comparing the emoji to a tone tag, he wrote: "Punctuating the text with a skull lightens the tone and signals humility".[18]
Kayleigh Dray of Stylist thought the popularization of the skull emoji was related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the "dystopian pandemic nightmare" it resulted in. "[T]he laugh-cry emoji has died a sad little death and been replaced with an ever-so-appropriate skull", wrote the journalist.[19]
See also
References
- ^ a b Scherer, Markus; Davis, Mark; Momoi, Kat; Tong, Darick; Kida, Yasuo; Edberg, Peter. "Emoji Symbols: Background Data—Background data for Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols" (PDF). UTC L2/10-132. Archived (PDF) from the original on June 15, 2019.
- ^ "💀 Skull Emoji". Emojipedia. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
- ^ "🍏 Apple Emoji List — Emojis for iPhone, iPad and macOS [Updated: 2024]". Emojipedia. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
- ^ Cocozza, Paula (November 17, 2015). "Crying with laughter: how we learned how to speak emoji". The Guardian. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
- ^ a b Unicode Consortium. "Emoji Sources". Unicode Character Database.
- ^ JoyPixels. "Emoji Alpha Codes". Emoji Toolkit. Archived from the original on January 23, 2021. Retrieved April 24, 2020.
- ^ a b Android Open Source Project (2009). "GMoji Raw". Skia Emoji. Archived from the original on October 3, 2020. Retrieved September 21, 2020.
- ^ Unicode, Inc. "Annotations". Common Locale Data Repository. Archived from the original on January 23, 2021. Retrieved September 21, 2020.
- ^ Medley, Lorenza (August 28, 2022). "Get to Know Gen Z". Wisconsin State Journal. p. D8. Retrieved February 14, 2025 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ Kelati, Haben (January 31, 2022). "New emoji appear every year, but where do they come from?". The Washington Post. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
- ^ Thompson, Clive (April 19, 2016). "The Emoji Is the Birth of a New Type of Language (No Joke)". Wired. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
- ^ Chalabi, Mona (June 5, 2014). "The 100 Most-Used Emojis". FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
- ^ Brown, Dalvin (September 17, 2019). "Happy World Emoji Day! These are the top 10 icons used this year on Facemoji". USA Today. Retrieved February 15, 2025.
- ^ Piazza, Jake; Khan, Melina; Capoot, Ashley (October 17, 2023). "How Gen Z uses technology — flip phones, digital cameras, voice memos". CNBC. Retrieved February 25, 2025.
- ^ a b Yurieff, Kaya (February 14, 2021). "Sorry, millennials. The 😂 emoji isn't cool anymore". CNN. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
- ^ Parkinson, Hannah Jane (July 15, 2023). "Once sneered at, it seems emojis are having the last laugh". The Guardian. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
- ^ Lange, Maggie (October 26, 2015). "The Ghost Emoji Is Perfect". GQ. Retrieved February 15, 2025.
- ^ Aleksic, Adam (May 15, 2024). "Gen Z's new punctuation". The Washington Post. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
- ^ Dray, Kayleigh (February 19, 2021). "The sad death of the laugh-cry emoji (and why it bothers us so much, really)". Stylist. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
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