Barbados Emoji & Symbols

The Barbados flag emoji 🇧🇧 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, B and B (Barbados's ISO country code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag. Most country flags, Barbados's among them, arrived as emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support (Windows' own emoji font, for example) you see the letters BB instead; the text underneath is the same, so it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone.

The flag was raised on Independence Day, 30 November 1966, and was designed by the Barbadian art teacher Grantley Prescod, who won the national competition for it. It has three vertical bands, ultramarine, gold and ultramarine, for the sea and sky around the island and its golden sand. In the middle is the black head of a broken trident. The colonial badge of Barbados showed Britannia holding a whole trident; on the flag the shaft is snapped off, for the break with the colonial past, and the three points stand for the three principles of democracy: government of, for and by the people.

There is no emoji of the flag's trident head on its own, so people use 🔱 (the trident emblem) beside 🇧🇧, and paste the flag colours as hearts 💙💛🖤. You will see 🇧🇧🔱 in bios, on Independence posts and under every Barbados cricket win.

Barbados symbols: flying fish, Pride of Barbados and the bearded fig tree

🐟 Flying fish is the emblem everyone recognises: Barbados calls itself the land of the flying fish, the fish turns up on souvenirs, logos and the old Bridgetown fish markets, and with cou-cou it makes the national dish. 🌺 is the nearest emoji to the national flower, the Pride of Barbados, a shrub with red-and-yellow blossoms (it is not a hibiscus, but 🌺 is what people paste for it). 🌳 stands for the bearded fig tree, whose hanging aerial roots probably gave the island its name: Portuguese sailors called it Os Barbados, the bearded ones.

The bearded fig and two Pride of Barbados flowers sit on the national coat of arms, held up by a pelican and a dolphin fish, with an arm holding two crossed sugar canes above and the motto Pride and Industry. 🏏 and 🥃 are unofficial but just as strong: cricket is close to a national religion, and Barbados is often called the birthplace of rum. Barbadians call themselves Bajans, and the island has the old nickname Bim, as in "Sweet Bim 🇧🇧".

Bajan food and drink emoji: cou-cou, flying fish, pudding and souse

There is no emoji for cou-cou, so Bajans build it: 🐟🌽 is cou-cou and flying fish, the national dish of cornmeal and okra stirred smooth with a cou-cou stick and served with flying fish steamed in a spicy gravy. 🧀 is macaroni pie, the baked macaroni and cheese of every Sunday lunch; 🍗🍚 is fried chicken with rice and peas; 🍞 is salt bread, and a "bread and two" is a salt bread with two fish cakes inside. A drop of 🌶️ means Bajan pepper sauce, the yellow Scotch bonnet and mustard sauce that goes on almost everything.

Saturday is for pudding and souse 🐖🍠🥒: spiced steamed sweet potato with pickled pork, lime, cucumber and hot pepper. 🐙 is "sea cat", the Bajan name for octopus, and 🦞🍤 are the seafood of the Friday night fish fry at Oistins. Around Independence, people steam conkies 🎃🥥🍌: cornmeal, pumpkin, coconut, sweet potato and spice wrapped in banana leaves. At Christmas it is great cake 🍰, a dark fruit cake soaked in rum.

To drink: 🥃 rum straight or 🍹🍋‍🟩 rum punch, mixed by the Caribbean rhyme "one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak", and 🍺 a cold Banks, the local beer. Mount Gay rum traces itself to a deed of 1703, and the island's rum shops, small wooden bars on nearly every village road, are where dominoes, cricket talk and politics happen.

Crop Over, Independence Day and the holiday emoji people send

Crop Over began on the sugar plantations as the celebration that marked the end of the cane harvest, and was revived as a national festival in 1974. The season runs through the summer: calypso tents and the Pic-O-De-Crop competition 🎤, recognition for sugar-harvest workers (the King and Queen titles ended in 2017) 👑, and Foreday Morning, a jam before dawn in paint and powder 🫟. It ends on Grand Kadooment Day, the first Monday in August, when bands in feathered and jewelled costumes parade to the soca: 🎭🪶💃🕺🥁🎶 is its emoji set.

Independence Day on 30 November is the day of 🇧🇧🎉🎆: Barbados became independent of Britain in 1966 under its first prime minister, Errol Barrow, and on the same date in 2021 it became a republic with its own president as head of state instead of the British monarch. Buildings are lit up in ultramarine and gold, and people wear the flag colours and eat conkies. Emancipation Day on 1 August marks the end of slavery in the British colonies in 1834; ⛓️‍💥 echoes the Emancipation Statue near Bridgetown, a freed man with broken chains, often called the Bussa statue after the leader of the 1816 rebellion. On Easter Monday the sky fills with homemade kites 🪁, and Christmas brings 🎄 with great cake and ham.

Cricket, road tennis, beaches and island life

🏏 Cricket is Barbados's great sport. The island plays for the West Indies with its Caribbean neighbours (🇹🇹🇯🇲🇬🇾 and more), it produced Sir Garfield Sobers and the "three Ws", Worrell, Weekes and Walcott, and Kensington Oval in Bridgetown hosted the finals of the 2007 Cricket World Cup and the 2024 T20 World Cup. Road tennis 🏓🎾 is a Barbadian invention, played in the street with wooden paddles, a tennis ball with its fuzz stripped off and a low plank for a net. Dominoes 🁡 are slammed on rum-shop tables, horse racing 🏇 runs at the Garrison Savannah, and the Soup Bowl at Bathsheba on the wild east coast is one of the Caribbean's best-known surf breaks 🏄.

The calm west and south coasts are the 🏝️🏖️☀️🌊🌅 of holiday photos. In Carlisle Bay you can snorkel 🤿 over shipwrecks 🚢 and swim with sea turtles 🐢; hawksbills nest on the beaches. Inland live 🐒 green monkeys, brought from West Africa centuries ago, the 🐸 whistling frogs whose chorus fills every Barbados night, and the 🐑 Barbados Blackbelly, a sheep with hair instead of wool. The 🏠 chattel house, a small wooden home built so that it could be taken apart and moved, is the island's own architecture, and 🚐 is the ZR, the white route taxi with a maroon stripe that races between villages alongside the blue 🚌 government buses.

In Bridgetown, 🏛️ is Parliament, whose House of Assembly has sat since 1639, one of the oldest in the Commonwealth, and 🕍 the Nidhe Israel Synagogue, founded in the 17th century and one of the oldest in the Americas. Historic Bridgetown and its Garrison are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Barbados dollar symbol $ and writing in Bajan English

The currency is the Barbados dollar (code BBD), divided into 100 cents and pegged at 2 Barbados dollars to 1 US dollar since 1975. It uses the ordinary dollar sign $; when the currency could be confused with US dollars it is written Bds$ or BBD$, as in Bds$20. US dollars are widely accepted on the island. Type $ with Shift + 4; the cent sign ¢ is Alt + 0162 on Windows, Option + 4 on a Mac and ¢ in HTML.

English is the official language, written with British spelling (colour, centre), and it needs no letters beyond plain A–Z, so this page has no special-letter grid; the English collection covers the punctuation and typography of English itself. Day to day, most people also speak Bajan, the island's English-based Creole, and its sayings are a favourite caption: "Cheese on bread!" for surprise or exasperation, and "Hard ears yuh won't hear, own way yuh gine feel" for what happens to people who ignore good advice. CLDR estimates put the population at about 300,000, on an island of about 430 square kilometres.