Skull emoji
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, replacing 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][15][16] They viewed Face with Tears of Joy emoji, the emoji previously used to convey these emotions, as "uncool",[17] due to its association with older generations.[14] Before this meaning of the skull emoji became popular, in 2015, the ghost emoji (👻) was used instead.[18]
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".[19]
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.[15]
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.
- ^ a b Yurieff, Kaya (February 14, 2021). "Sorry, millennials. The 😂 emoji isn't cool anymore". CNN. Retrieved February 14, 2025.
- ^ a b 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.
- ^ "Don't put on a happy face! Are you using the smiley emoji all wrong?". The Guardian. August 11, 2021. Retrieved February 20, 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.