British Virgin Islands Emoji & Symbols

The British Virgin Islands flag emoji 🇻🇬 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, V and G (the territory's ISO code, which also gives it the internet domain .vg), and phones and apps draw the pair as the flag. Most country flags, this one among them, became emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support, such as Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters VG instead; the text underneath is the same, so the person you send it to still sees the flag on a phone.

The flag, adopted in 1960, is a British Blue Ensign: dark blue with the Union Jack 🇬🇧 in the corner and the territory's coat of arms in the fly. The arms show Saint Ursula in a white dress on a green shield, holding a lamp, with eleven more lamps around her, above the motto Vigilate, Latin for "be watchful". She is there because Columbus, sailing past in 1493, named the many islands after her and her legendary eleven thousand virgin companions. The nearest emoji to her lamps is 🪔, and the colours paste as hearts 💙🤍💚.

If you have seen the BVI flag in red, that is the red ensign: the same arms on a red field with the Union Jack, flown as the civil ensign by boats registered in the territory, so you meet it on yachts more than on land. Both are covered by the one emoji 🇻🇬; ❤️ beside it nods to the red version.

British Virgin Islands symbols: sailing, The Baths and pirate legends

⛵ Sailboat is the most BVI emoji after the flag. Some sixty islands and cays sit close together in sheltered water with steady trade winds 🌬️, which made the territory a popular place to charter a yacht and earned it the name sailing capital of the Caribbean. The BVI Spring Regatta brings racing boats every spring (⛵🏁🏆), and ferries ⛴️ link Tortola, Virgin Gorda and Jost Van Dyke with each other and with St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands 🇻🇮.

🪨 Rock stands for The Baths on Virgin Gorda, where giant granite boulders lie piled on the beach and the sea flows into pools and grottoes between them, one of the best-known sights in the islands. 🏴‍☠️ Pirate flag, 🗺️ and 🪎 belong to Norman Island, whose sea caves are tied to legends of buried pirate treasure and which is often said to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. 🚢 is the wreck of the RMS Rhone, a Royal Mail steamer sunk in a hurricane off Salt Island in 1867, now the territory's best-known dive site 🤿🐠.

Far out to the north-east lies Anegada, a flat coral island unlike the hilly volcanic others, ringed by the long Horseshoe Reef. It gives three of the page's emoji: 🦞 for the Anegada lobster grilled on its beaches, 🦩 for the flamingos that were brought back to its salt ponds in the 1990s, and 🦎 for the Anegada rock iguana, which lives nowhere else on earth and is critically endangered.

Food, music and festival emoji

Fish and fungi is usually named the national dish: fungi (say FOON-ghee) is cornmeal cooked smooth, often with okra, served with stewed or fried fish, so 🐟🌽🍲. Roti 🫓 filled with curried chicken 🍗, peas and rice 🫛🍚, conch and crab 🦀 fill the rest of the plate. The drink everyone posts is the Painkiller 🍹: dark rum, pineapple 🍍 and orange 🍊 juice and cream of coconut 🥥, grated nutmeg on top, first mixed at the Soggy Dollar Bar on Jost Van Dyke, a beach bar with no dock, so guests swim ashore and pay with wet banknotes 💵.

Fungi is also the name of the islands' own music, played by small scratch bands on guitar, drums, shakers and whatever else comes to hand 🎶🎸🥁🪇. A big party of the year is the Emancipation Festival around the start of August, marking the end of slavery in 1834, with parades, a festival village, pageants and a queen: ⛓️‍💥✊🎭💃🕺👑. On Beef Island, Trellis Bay holds full moon parties where metal fireball sculptures are set alight on the water 🌕🔥, and on New Year's Eve, called Old Year's Night, boats crowd into Great Harbour on Jost Van Dyke for the party at Foxy's 🎆🥂🍾.

British Virgin Islands currency symbol: the US dollar

The British Virgin Islands are British, but their currency is the US dollar, official since 1959, so prices are written with the plain dollar sign $ and cents ¢, and banknotes 💵 are the same ones used in the US. The nearby British territory of Anguilla 🇦🇮 uses the Eastern Caribbean dollar instead. 🏦 and 💼 stand for the other side of the economy: the BVI are one of the largest registers of offshore companies in the world, and "BVI company" is a phrase known in banking far beyond the Caribbean.

On a US keyboard, press Shift + 4 for $; other layouts vary. For ¢, hold Alt and type 0162 on the Windows number pad, press Option + 4 on a Mac, or write ¢ in HTML; on a phone, long-press $ on the symbols keyboard.

The language is English (CLDR estimates about 39,000 speakers among some 40,000 people), with Virgin Islands Creole in everyday speech, so there are no special letters to type beyond A–Z; see our English collection for its punctuation and quotation marks, and our US Virgin Islands, United Kingdom and Anguilla collections for the neighbours.