Bell Pepper

A sweet pepper: food, cooking and fresh vegetables, with zero spice. The bell pepper is a cultivar of Capsicum annuum, the same species as cayenne and jalapeño, but it carries a gene that stops it producing capsaicin, the compound that burns. It scores zero on the Scoville heat scale. Botanically it is a fruit (a berry, strictly), but every kitchen treats it as a vegetable: sliced raw into salads, roasted, stuffed with rice and meat, tossed into stir-fries and fajitas, or scattered over pizza.

The name changes with the map. Americans and Canadians say bell pepper, the British say sweet pepper or just pepper, Australians, New Zealanders and Indians say capsicum, and most of Europe uses some form of paprika, the Hungarian word that English reserves for the ground red spice. Green peppers are simply unripe; left on the plant they turn yellow, orange or red and get sweeter. Most platforms draw the emoji green, so it often reads as the green pepper specifically.

In practice the emoji does exactly what it shows. It appears in grocery lists, meal plans, recipe captions, vegetarian and vegan posts, and photos of homegrown peppers in late summer.

What does it mean when someone sends 🫑?

Almost always food: an item to buy, a dish to cook, a dinner to plan. If a friend sends 🫑 with no words, the likeliest reading is "peppers" on a shopping list, or a nudge about what is going into tonight's meal.

The pepper has no established slang. It is the plain cousin of 🍆, which carries a well-known sexual joke; nothing comparable has attached itself to 🫑, so a pepper in your inbox is about peppers. Occasionally people use it as a mild-versus-spicy marker, replying to 🌶️ to say they cannot take heat, or simply as a splash of green in colour-themed lists. Those are small side uses; the kitchen is home.