What 🌧️ means
Steady rain, drawn the way weather forecasts draw it.
It shows the same picture as the rain icon in a weather app or a TV forecast: a cloud, straight streaks of rain underneath, nothing else. That is why it slips so easily into messages about plans. "🌧️ all weekend", "walking home in this 🌧️", a rained-off match or a cancelled barbecue. Among the weather emoji it sits in the middle: milder than ⛈️, which adds lightning for a thunderstorm, and heavier than 🌦️, where the sun peeks out and the shower will pass.
Cartoons have long drawn a glum character with a private rain cloud over their head, and the emoji inherits that. "Mondays 🌧️" or "missing you 🌧️" read as feeling grey. It can also be cosy: rain outside, tea and a book inside, 🌧️☕📖. In both cases the words carry the mood; a 🌧️ sent on its own is about the sky.
It is one of a batch of weather pictures Unicode took over in 2014 from the old Wingdings and Webdings symbol fonts, which is why it existed first as a plain black-and-white sign and got its colour emoji look afterwards.
Neutral and literal; it takes its tone from the words around it.
Replying 🌧️ to someone's good news can look like you are raining on their parade.
What it means when someone sends it to you
4 readingsDon't confuse it with
4Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- 🌧️ is not one character. It is 2 of them glued together, which is why deleting it sometimes takes two presses of backspace and why it breaks character counters.
Questions people ask
2Why does 🌧️ sometimes look black and white?
Because its default is a text-style symbol. An invisible marker, U+FE0F, asks for the colour emoji; apps or fonts that drop it show a plain outline instead.
Is there a heavy rain emoji?
No single one. People repeat it, 🌧️🌧️🌧️, or switch to ⛈️ when the rain comes with thunder.
How to type 🌧️
:rain_cloud:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.🌧️Codes and encoding2 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.