Brazil Emoji & Symbols

🇧🇷 the Brazil flag emoji shows the national flag: a green field, a yellow rhombus and a blue globe crossed by a white band with the motto Ordem e Progresso, "Order and Progress", a phrase taken from the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte. The 27 white stars on the globe show the sky over Rio de Janeiro on the morning of 15 November 1889, the day the Republic was proclaimed, and each star stands for one state or the Federal District.

The emoji is not a picture stored in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇧 and 🇷, the country code BR. Phones and Macs draw the pair as the flag; Windows draws no country flags in its emoji font, so you see the letters BR there, while the person you send it to on a phone still sees the flag. Brazil was not one of the ten flags in the original Japanese phone emoji sets; its flag sequence was added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015, using regional indicator symbols added in Unicode 6.0 in 2010.

When there is no flag at hand, Brazilians write the colours instead: 💚💛 is the classic "verde e amarelo", and 💚💛💙🤍 adds the blue globe and the white band.

Brazil emoji: football, Carnaval and music

⚽ is the first emoji most people pair with 🇧🇷. Brazil has won the World Cup five times (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994 and 2002), more than any other country, which is why the yellow shirt, the amarelinha 👕, carries five stars above its crest and why fans post 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆 or dream of the hexa, a sixth title. 🏟️ stands for the Maracanã in Rio and every stadium on match day.

Carnaval, in the days before Ash Wednesday in February or March, gets 🎭💃🕺 and 🥁🪘 for the drum sections, the baterias, of Rio's samba schools; 🪶 for the feathered costumes; 🎺 for the brass bands of street blocos; and ☂️ for frevo in Recife and Olinda, danced with a tiny colourful umbrella. Salvador's Carnaval follows the trios elétricos, trucks carrying the band through the crowd.

Brazilian music has its own emoji too: 🎸 for bossa nova and the acoustic violão, 🪕 for pagode, where a banjo with a cavaquinho neck is part of the classic sound, 🪗 for forró and the sanfona of the Northeast, 🤠 for sertanejo and rodeo country, and 🎶 for everything else.

Brazilian holidays and the emoji people send

Festa Junina, the June festivals of Saint Anthony, Saint John and Saint Peter, is the second big party of the year, largest in the Northeast (Campina Grande and Caruaru both claim the biggest). Invitations to an arraiá come with 🌽 for pamonha and canjica, 🔥 for the bonfire, 👒🤠 for the straw hats and checked shirts of the quadrilha dance, and 🥜 for paçoca and pé-de-moleque.

Réveillon, New Year's Eve, is 🎆🥂🍾 and white clothes 🤍: millions watch the fireworks on Copacabana beach, and many jump seven waves 🌊 for luck or leave white flowers in the sea for Iemanjá, the sea goddess of Candomblé and Umbanda, who also has her own festival in Salvador on 2 February.

Christmas falls in summer, so 🎄 often sits next to 🏖️ and ☀️. 7 de Setembro, Independence Day, brings 🇧🇷🎆, and Brazilians celebrate Dia dos Namorados, their Valentine's Day, on 12 June. For faith, ✝️⛪🙏📿 cover the country's Catholic and evangelical majority; 🧿 (the olho grego) and 🌿 (a sprig of arruda, rue) are popular good-luck charms.

Food, beaches and the Amazon in emoji

A Sunday churrasco is 🥩🍖🔥, usually with 🍺 cold beer; 🫘🍚 is arroz e feijão, the everyday plate, and also feijoada, the black-bean stew; 🍲 does for moqueca. 🧀 stands in for pão de queijo, 🍫 for brigadeiro and 🍮 for pudim, the condensed-milk flan found at every birthday. 🍋‍🟩🍹 is a caipirinha, cachaça with lime and sugar; ☕ is the cafezinho (Brazil is the world's largest coffee producer); 🧉 is chimarrão, the mate of Rio Grande do Sul; and 🥤 covers guaraná soda.

There is no açaí emoji, so 🫐 does the job; 🥥 is água de coco on the beach, with 🥭🍍 for the fruit stalls. Beach days are 🏖️🌴☀️ with 👙 and 🩴, the flip-flop that Havaianas made famous worldwide. 🚡 is the cable car up the Sugarloaf in Rio, running since 1912, with ⛰️ for the mountain itself; 🏙️ is São Paulo's skyline; 🪁 is the pipa, the kite children fly from rooftops and hills.

For the Amazon and the Pantanal there are 🌳🛶🦜 (macaws and parrots), 🐒, 🦥, 🐊 for the jacaré, 🐍 for the anaconda and 🐬 for the pink river dolphin, the boto. Several Brazilian favourites have no emoji of their own: 🐆 stands in for the jaguar (onça-pintada), 🦫 for the capybara (capivara), and there is no toucan at all. 🌵 is the mandacaru cactus of the dry sertão and 🐂 the ox of the Boi-Bumbá festival in Parintins.

Christ the Redeemer, finished in 1931, has no emoji; people write the name or use ✝️ with 🇧🇷.

Brazilian real symbol R$ and Portuguese letters

The Brazilian real symbol is R$: a capital R followed by the dollar sign $, which Brazilians call the cifrão. There is no single Unicode character for it, so you type the two. Prices put a space after it and use a comma for decimals and a dot for thousands: R$ 1.234,56. The real has been the currency since 1994; before it Brazil used several cruzeiros, whose sign ₢ exists in Unicode but is now only of historical interest.

Brazil's language is Portuguese, spoken by roughly 200 million people in the country (a CLDR estimate, out of about 214 million inhabitants). Its accents do real work: the acute (á é ó) marks a stressed open vowel, while í and ú mark stressed i and u; the circumflex (â ê ô) marks a stressed closed one, so avó is grandmother and avô grandfather; the tilde (ã õ) makes a vowel nasal, as in pão, mãe and corações; the grave appears almost only in à, the contraction of a + a (vou à praia); and ç is an s sound before a, o and u, as in açaí and coração. 1º and 1ª use the ordinal signs º and ª. The 2009 Portuguese spelling agreement removed ü from Portuguese words: lingüiça became linguiça.

To type them, Brazilian ABNT2 keyboards have a Ç key and dead keys for ´ ` ^ ~. On Windows with US-International, type ' then a for á, ~ then a for ã, ^ then e for ê and ' then c for ç; or hold Alt and type 0227 for ã, 0245 for õ, 0231 for ç, 0199 for Ç. On a US Mac, Option+N then a gives ã, Option+E then a vowel gives the acute, Option+I the circumflex, Option+C gives ç, Option+0 º and Option+9 ª. On phones, long-press the letter. The full alphabet is on our Portuguese collection, and Portugal has its own page.

Brazil symbols for nicknames and chats

Brazilians laugh in text with kkkkk (the more k's, the funnier) or rsrs, from risos. 👍 the joinha is used constantly as a friendly OK, and 🤙 is the surfer's hang-loose. In Brazil, 👌 usually signals OK or approval, though its meaning can vary by context.

Brazilian gamers, in Free Fire and other games, sometimes put ᴮᴿ in their nickname, built from two small modifier letters, ᴮ and ᴿ; copy them from the grid and add your own decorations. Other places in the region have their own pages, such as Argentina and Mexico, and the Portuguese-speaking countries Portugal, Angola and Mozambique.