Bermuda Emoji & Symbols

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

The flag is a red ensign: a red field with the Union Jack in the upper corner and Bermuda's coat of arms in the fly. Most British Overseas Territories fly a blue ensign, so the red one makes Bermuda's flag easy to tell apart. The arms show a red lion 🦁 holding a shield 🛡️, and on the shield is a ship 🚢 wrecked on the rocks, traditionally taken to be the Sea Venture, the flagship of a fleet bound for Jamestown, Virginia, which ran onto Bermuda's reefs in a storm in 1609. Everyone aboard reached shore, and their accidental landing began English settlement of the islands. The motto under the arms is Quo Fata Ferunt, "whither the fates carry us". There is no lion-and-shield emoji, so people paste the flag itself, or its colours as hearts ❤️🤍💙.

Bermuda symbols: the cahow, the longtail, the cedar and the pink sand

Bermuda's national bird is the cahow, the Bermuda petrel. It was thought extinct for about three centuries until a few nesting pairs were found on rocky islets in Castle Harbour in 1951, and a long conservation effort has slowly brought it back. Unicode has no petrel, so 🐦 does the job, and it doubles for the longtail, the white-tailed tropicbird whose return each spring Bermudians greet as the first sign of the season. The national tree is the Bermuda cedar 🌲, a juniper found nowhere else, and the national flower is the small blue-violet Bermudiana; with no emoji for it, people reach for 🌺 hibiscus, which grows in every garden.

The beaches are what most visitors picture: pink sand 🩷🏝️ at Horseshoe Bay, Elbow Beach and Warwick Long Bay. The colour comes from crushed shells of a tiny red reef organism, a foraminifer, mixed into white coral sand. 🐢🐠🪸 are for snorkelling the reefs, 🐋 for the humpback whales that pass the island each spring, and 🤿⚓🪎 for diving the hundreds of shipwrecks on the reefs around the island, some of which gave up real treasure.

Bermuda shorts, rain roofs, scooters and moongates

Bermuda shorts 🩳 are not beachwear here. Worn tailored, with knee-high socks 🧦, a shirt and tie 👔 and a blazer 🧥, they are proper business dress in Hamilton's offices 💼, where much of the world's reinsurance industry is based. Paste 🩳🧦👔 and any Bermudian knows what you mean.

The pastel houses 🏠🏡 have white stepped roofs of limestone, built to catch rain 🌧️💧: Bermuda has no rivers or lakes, so each house channels the water from its roof into its own tank. Visitors cannot rent ordinary cars, so they ride scooters 🛵, the pink-and-blue buses 🚌 and the ferries ⛴️ across the harbour, and cruise ships 🛳️ dock at the old Royal Naval Dockyard. 🌙 stands for the island's stone moongates, round arches that couples walk through for luck, and 💒 for the weddings and honeymoons they are part of. ⛪🏰 is the Town of St. George, founded in 1612 and with its forts a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On warm nights the tiny whistling tree frogs 🐸 chirp everywhere.

👋 belongs too. Bermudians greet each other with a "Good morning" before anything else, and for about 30 years a man named Johnny Barnes stood at a roundabout in Paget every morning, waving at commuters and telling them he loved them; there is now a statue of him there.

Bermuda Triangle emoji 🔺✈️🚢

There is no Bermuda Triangle emoji, so people build it from 🔺 (red triangle pointed up) with ✈️ or 🚢 and a ❓ or 🌀. The Bermuda Triangle is the stretch of the Atlantic roughly between Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico, made famous by magazine stories and books in the 1960s and 1970s about ships and planes that vanished there, among them Flight 19, five US Navy bombers lost in 1945. Investigations have found no more disappearances there than in other busy, stormy waters. In Bermuda itself the triangle is often played for laughs with visitors, and 🌀 is more likely to mean a real hurricane.

Bermuda currency symbol: the Bermudian dollar $

Bermuda's currency is the Bermudian dollar (code BMD), introduced in 1970 to replace the pound and divided into 100 cents. It is pegged one to one to the US dollar, it is written with the same $ sign, and US dollars 💵 are accepted everywhere on the island, though Bermudian notes are not taken in the United States. When you need to make the difference clear, write BMD 20 or BD$20 against US$20. The cent sign ¢ is Alt+0162 on Windows, Option+4 on a Mac and ¢ in HTML.

🐖 is a Bermudian money joke with a history. Wild hogs, left on the island by passing ships before anyone lived there, fed the Sea Venture castaways, and the first coins made for the colony, the "hogge money" of the 1610s, carried a hog on one side. The one-cent coin of the modern Bermudian dollar showed a wild hog too.

Bermuda holidays, Cup Match and the emoji people send

Cup Match is the island's great summer holiday: a two-day cricket match 🏏 between the St. George's and Somerset clubs, played on the Thursday and Friday before the first Monday in August. The two days are public holidays, Emancipation Day 🕊️ and Mary Prince Day, named since 2020 after the Bermudian-born woman whose 1831 account of her life in slavery helped the campaign to end it. Fans wear their club's colours, Somerset red and navy ❤️💙 and St. George's light and dark blue 🩵💙, and around the field people play Crown and Anchor 👑⚓🎲, a dice game also played at licensed establishments with commission approval.

On Good Friday Bermudians fly homemade kites 🪁 of coloured tissue paper and sticks and eat codfish cakes on hot cross buns 🐟🍞. Bermuda Day, in late May, brings a parade in Hamilton, a half-marathon 🏃 and the traditional first swim of the year 🏊. The gombeys 🥁🪶🦚🎭, masked dancers in tall headdresses of peacock feathers who dance to drums and the captain's whistle, come out on Boxing Day and other holidays. Christmas 🎄 means cassava pie 🥧, baked with chicken 🍗 or pork, and New Year's Eve ends with fireworks 🎆.