Cat Emoji

🐱 Cat Face is the one most people mean by "the cat emoji": a round orange tabby head, drawn front-on like a sticker. 🐈 Cat is the same animal standing side-on, the drawing you use when you describe what the cat is doing ("the 🐈 knocked it off the table"), and 🐈‍⬛ Black Cat is its black twin, which carries all the Halloween, witch and superstition meanings. 🐾 Paw Prints is not a cat alone, it stands for any pet, but it closes almost every cat message. All of them except the black cat arrived with the first big emoji release, Unicode 6.0 in 2010, carried over from the Japanese mobile carrier sets; 🐈‍⬛ joined in 2020.

The nine cat faces are ordinary smileys drawn as a cat, so each one means what the matching human face means, only cuter and a bit less serious. 😺 Grinning Cat is a plain happy hello. 😸 Grinning Cat with Smiling Eyes is a warmer, giggling smile. 😹 Cat with Tears of Joy is the cat version of 😂, the classic lolcat reaction. 😻 Smiling Cat with Heart-Eyes is adoration, for a crush, a kitten picture or a plate of food. 😽 Kissing Cat is a small, polite kiss. 😼 Cat with Wry Smile is the smirk: smug, sly, up to something. 🙀 Weary Cat is officially "weary" but Apple and Google draw it screaming with its paws on its cheeks, so in practice it means shock or horror. 😿 Crying Cat is a single sad tear, and 😾 Pouting Cat is the grumpy, offended cat, the one for "I am not amused".

Cat emoji meaning from a girl, from a guy, and in slang

From a girl or a guy in a chat, a cat emoji is nearly always affection or playfulness: 🐱 next to your name means you are cute to them, 😻 means they really like what you sent, 😼 that they are teasing. Cat lovers simply use 🐱 and 🐾 as a signature in bios and captions. In WhatsApp and TikTok comments, 😹 is the old-internet laugh, a little softer than 😂, and 😾 is the reply to a bad joke or a cancelled plan. 🐈‍⬛ on its own is the witchy, dark-academia and Halloween cat, and it is also used for bad luck, or by people who simply have a black cat.

Two things to know before you send one. 🐱 is also a long-standing innuendo for female anatomy, which is why "cat emoji meaning from a guy" is a common search; in a flirty thread between adults it may be read that way, in a normal chat it is just a cat. And there is no official cat with star eyes: the sparkly, star-eyed kitten people ask about is a sticker or a custom Discord emoji, so the nearest keyboard versions are 😻 (hearts) or the pair 🐱🤩. The big cats are their own thing: 🦁 Lion is pride, courage and the Leo zodiac sign, 🐯 Tiger Face and 🐅 Tiger stand for strength and the Year of the Tiger, and 🐆 Leopard covers cheetahs, jaguars and leopard print.

Cat text faces: =^.^=, ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ and other cat kaomoji

Long before colour emoji, people typed cats out of punctuation: =^.^= is the oldest, two equals signs for whiskers, carets for ears, a dot for the nose. Japanese kaomoji made the cat rounder and more expressive. (=^･ω･^=) uses a lowercase Greek omega ω as the cat's mouth, the shape of a cat's upper lip seen from the front, and halfwidth katakana middle dots ･ as eyes. ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ borrows the Thai letter ฅ (Kho Khon) for two raised paws and the Arabic medial ʿayn ﻌ for the nose and mouth. ≽^•⩊•^≼, the face that spread through TikTok comments and Discord names, uses two maths relation signs ≽ ≼ as cheeks and whiskers and the joined-union sign ⩊ as a smiling mouth.

The parts in the grid let you build your own. Ears are ^ ＾ or the Canadian syllabics marks ᐠ ᐟ, as in /ᐠ｡ꞈ｡ᐟ\ᵐᵉᵒʷ, where the little meow is written in superscript letters ᵐᵉᵒʷ. Eyes are • ･ ｡ or the wide ◕ ◉. Mouths are ω ⩊ ﻌ ꞈ or the small katakana ェ of (=^･ｪ･^=). Tails come from マ in /ᐠ - ˕ -マ or ⟆ in ₍^. .^₎⟆, and ᓚᘏᗢ is a cat curled up asleep, three Canadian syllabics letters that happen to make a loaf. They all survive where emoji are stripped, in usernames, Roblox display names and plain-text comments, though a very old phone may show one rare letter as an empty box. For more faces of every mood, see Kaomoji Symbols and Cute & Kawaii Symbols; for the whole zoo, Animal Emoji.

Cat emoji on iPhone, Android, Discord and WhatsApp

Every platform draws the cats in its own style, but the characters are the same, so a 😻 sent from an iPhone is a 😻 on Android and in WhatsApp. On an iPhone, open the emoji keyboard and type "cat" in the search field to get all twelve cats at once; Gboard on Android does the same. On Windows press the Windows key + . (period), on a Mac Control + Command + Space. 🐈‍⬛ is the youngest cat (Emoji 13.0) and needs iOS 14.2, Android 11 or newer; older devices show it as 🐈 next to a black square ⬛, because it is really those two characters joined by an invisible joiner.

On Discord, Slack and GitHub you can type shortcodes instead: :cat: for 🐱, :cat2: for 🐈, :black_cat: for 🐈‍⬛, :smiley_cat: 😺, :smile_cat: 😸, :joy_cat: 😹, :heart_eyes_cat: 😻, :smirk_cat: 😼, :kissing_cat: 😽, :scream_cat: 🙀, :crying_cat_face: 😿, :pouting_cat: 😾 and :paw_prints: 🐾. The cat faces also make good server reactions because they read clearly at a small size.