What 🐱 means
🐱 is the cat face emoji, filed under Animals & Nature in the animal-mammal subgroup of the Unicode emoji index.
It was added in Emoji 0.6 (2010) and the underlying characters entered Unicode in version 6.0 (2010).
How it is encoded
🐱 is a single code point, U+1F431.
It is RGI (recommended for general interchange), so every major platform ships artwork for it.
Sweet and harmless by default — purrs, not propositions.
In an already sexual chat, 🐱 can mean female genitals; read the surrounding messages first.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2A caption for a fresh cat photo.
A suggested pairing: the cat is asleep, or you're napping like one.
Worth knowing
- 🐱 came into Unicode in 2010 from the cat pictographs of Japan's early mobile-phone emoji sets, run by carriers NTT DoCoMo, au (KDDI) and SoftBank.
Questions people ask
1Is the cat emoji flirty?
Only if the chat already is. Next to a pet photo, cat joke or everyday message, 🐱 simply means cat.
How to type 🐱
Windows
Win+.Open the emoji picker and search “cat face”.
macOS
Control+Command+Spaceopens the character viewer.
iOS / Android
Emoji keyboard → search “cat face”.
Chat apps
:cat:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.HTML
🐱Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
🐱
HTML hex
🐱
CSS content
content: "\1F431";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%90%B1
1
On screen
1
Code points
2
JS .length
4
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.