Bug & Insect Emoji

🦋 (butterfly) is the most used of the lot and almost never means an insect: it is transformation and a glow-up, a soft dreamy aesthetic, or “butterflies” in the stomach when you like someone. A social butterfly is someone who flits between friends. 🐝 is the busy bee: hard work, honey, spring, and the Beyhive, Beyoncé's fans. Spell “bee” with it and you get bee yourself or bee happy. 🐞 (ladybug, called Lady Beetle in Unicode) is luck, cuteness and gardens; in many countries a ladybird landing on you is a good omen.

🐛 is officially named “Bug”, but every major platform draws it as a green caterpillar, so people type it for caterpillars, for the start of a 🐛➡️🦋 transformation, and for software bugs: 🐛 is the standard bug label on GitHub and in commit messages. 🐌 (snail) is slowness, a slow reply, snail mail, or a cosy little garden creature. 🐜 (ant) stands for tiny, tireless workers, a crowd of people seen from above, or ants at a picnic.

Pests, crawlers and the ones that bite

🪲 (beetle), 🪳 (cockroach), 🪰 (fly) and 🪱 (worm) are the newest bugs, all added in Emoji 13.0 in 2020. The beetle is a neutral, shiny insect; the cockroach is a dirty place, a survivor who cannot be killed, or an insult. 🪰 is a housefly, so it means something annoying buzzing around, or “a fly on the wall”. 🪱 is an earthworm: gardening, fishing bait, a bookworm with 📚, or someone who wriggled out of a promise.

🦟 (mosquito) means bites, summer evenings, itching and tropical travel; in public-health posts it stands for malaria, dengue and Zika. 🦗 (cricket) is the awkward-silence emoji: when a joke gets no reaction, you answer with 🦗🦗🦗, the sound of crickets. It is not the sport; that one is 🏏.

🕷️ (spider) and 🕸️ (spider web) are the Halloween pair, also used for Spider-Man, for anything spooky or abandoned, and for a “web” of lies or the World Wide Web. 🦂 (scorpion) is danger and desert heat, and above all the star sign Scorpio (October 23 to November 21), which is why it sits next to its zodiac symbol ♏ here.

Germs, bug hunting and the garden

🦠 (microbe) is the germ emoji. It arrived in 2018 and became a global symbol of the coronavirus two years later; it still means any virus, bacteria or “I'm sick”. For a science angle add 🧫 petri dish and 🔬 microscope. 🔍 is the magnifying glass of a bug hunt, the classic kids' activity: look under 🪵 a log, in 🍄 mushrooms and 🌿 leaves.

Bugs live among flowers and leaves, so 🌸 🌼 🌻 🍃 🌿 🌱 come in handy for a garden scene, 🍯 goes with the bee, and 🐚 (spiral shell) is the snail's cousin from the beach. The bigger sets of flowers and plants are on the Nature Emoji and Animal Emoji pages.

Text-style bugs and insect characters

🕷️ and 🕸️ are different from the other bugs: they were added to Unicode in 2014 as text symbols and only later became emoji, so they exist in two styles. The plain forms 🕷 🕸 can show as small black-and-white glyphs, especially on Windows or in a document, while the versions on this page carry an invisible emoji selector that forces the colour picture.

For a different look, the Chinese and Japanese characters at the end of the grid name the insects themselves: 蝶 butterfly, 蜂 bee, 蚊 mosquito, 蠅 fly, 蠍 scorpion, 蟬 cicada, 蚕 silkworm, 蚤 flea and 虱 louse. Most share the insect radical 虫 on the left. They work as a tattoo-style caption or a quiet alternative to a colour emoji.