Cayman Islands Emoji & Symbols

The Cayman Islands flag emoji 🇰🇾 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, K and Y, the territory's ISO country code, which phones and apps draw together as the flag. Flags for every country and territory arrived as emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support, such as Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters KY instead; the text is the same, so it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone. (KY is also the abbreviation of Kentucky, so don't be surprised when a search for one turns up the other.)

The flag is a blue ensign: a dark blue field with the Union Jack in the upper corner and the Cayman Islands coat of arms in the fly. Until 1999 the arms sat on a white disc; today they stand straight on the blue. The arms tell the islands' story in pictures: a gold lion 🦁 on red for Britain, three green stars ⭐ for Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman, rising out of blue and white waves 🌊, and on top a green sea turtle 🐢 resting on a pineapple 🍍, the turtle for the seafaring and turtling that made the islands and the pineapple for their old link with Jamaica. The motto beneath is He hath founded it upon the seas, from Psalm 24. People who search "Cayman Islands flag red or blue" have usually seen the other version: the red ensign with the same arms is the civil flag flown by ships and yachts registered in Cayman, and the islands run one of the world's best-known registers of superyachts. On land, the flag is blue.

Cayman Islands symbols: turtle, parrot, silver thatch and blue iguana

When Christopher Columbus sailed past in 1503 he called the islands Las Tortugas for the sea turtles 🐢 crowding their waters, and turtles have been the islands' emblem ever since: Caymanian sailors hunted them for centuries across the western Caribbean, the turtle sits on the coat of arms, and the Cayman Turtle Centre on Grand Cayman breeds green sea turtles today. The name that stuck, Cayman, comes from caimán, a Carib word for the crocodiles 🐊 that once lived in the islands' swamps.

The national bird is the Cayman parrot 🦜, a green Amazon parrot with a white forehead and rosy cheeks, a subspecies of the Cuban parrot found only on Grand Cayman and Cayman Brac. The national tree is the silver thatch palm 🌴, which grows nowhere else in the world; its leaves were once twisted into rope 🪢 that Caymanians sold to Jamaica for ships, and woven into baskets 🧺 and hats 👒, a craft still kept alive. The national flower is the wild banana orchid, and as Unicode has no orchid, people fall back on 🌺, which fills the gardens of the Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park. The same park is home to the blue iguana 🦎💙, a big, slate-blue lizard found only on Grand Cayman, which a breeding and release programme brought back from the edge of extinction. 🐓 belongs too: free-roaming chickens are everywhere on Grand Cayman, from car parks to beach bars.

Seven Mile Beach, Stingray City and the reefs 🏝️🤿

Seven Mile Beach 🏝️🏖️ on Grand Cayman's west coast is the picture most people have of the islands: a long curve of white coral sand and calm turquoise water, in fact closer to five and a half miles long, with sunsets 🌅 over the sea. Stingray City is a shallow sandbar in the North Sound where southern stingrays gather around people standing waist-deep in the water. They first came for the scraps fishermen threw overboard while cleaning their catch; today boats bring visitors to feed and touch them. There is no stingray emoji, so posts use 🐟 or 🦈, and 🤿🐠🪸 for the snorkelling.

Cayman is one of the Caribbean's great diving destinations. The Bloody Bay Wall off Little Cayman drops from a shallow reef straight into the deep, and the USS Kittiwake 🚢⚓, a former US Navy submarine rescue ship, was sunk off Seven Mile Beach in 2011 as an artificial reef. At night, kayak tours 🛶 paddle into the Bioluminescent Bay in the North Sound, where every stroke lights up the water ✨. ⛵ is for the traditional Cayman catboat, the wooden sailing boat the turtlers built, 🎣 for deep-sea fishing for wahoo and tuna, and 🛳️ for the cruise ships that anchor off George Town and send their passengers ashore by tender.

Hell, Pedro St. James and island life 😈📮

Yes, you can go to Hell: it is a patch of black, jagged limestone in West Bay on Grand Cayman, and the little post office 📮 beside it stamps postcards from Hell. That is why 😈🔥📮 is a Cayman combo and "I've been to Hell and back" a favourite caption. Pedro St. James 🏛️, a restored stone great house from the 1780s in Savannah, is called the birthplace of democracy in the Cayman Islands, because the meeting that set up the first elected assembly was held there in 1831. 🪨 stands for Caymanite, a banded stone found only in the Cayman Islands and carved into jewellery.

🌀 is not a joke here: hurricane season runs from June to November, and Hurricane Ivan in 2004 flooded and damaged most of Grand Cayman. The islands are also one of the world's largest financial centres 🏦💼 for funds and companies, and there is no income tax, which brings many people to work in George Town's offices.

Cayman Islands dollar symbol: CI$ and the dollar sign $

The currency is the Cayman Islands dollar (code KYD), introduced in 1972 to replace the Jamaican dollar and divided into 100 cents. It is written with the ordinary $ sign; to tell it apart from the US dollar, write CI$ or KYD. It is fixed at CI$1 = US$1.20, so a Cayman dollar is worth more than a US one, and US dollars 💵 are accepted almost everywhere, with change usually given in Cayman dollars. The cent sign ¢ is Alt+0162 on Windows, Option+4 on a Mac and ¢ in HTML; $ is on every keyboard. English is the only official language, so no special letters are needed to write Caymanian names and places; see our English collection.

Caymanian food, Pirates Week, Batabano and the emoji people send

The national dish is turtle stew 🐢🍲, made from turtles farmed at the Cayman Turtle Centre, since wild turtles are protected. Everyday favourites are fish rundown, fish and vegetables simmered in coconut milk 🥥🍲, Cayman-style fish or beef cooked down with tomato, onion, sweet peppers and Scotch bonnet 🍅🧅🫑🌶️, jerk chicken 🍗 with rice and beans 🍚🫘 and fried plantain 🍌, conch fritters 🐚 and, from December to February, spiny lobster 🦞. For dessert there is heavy cake 🍰, a dense cake of cassava, coconut milk and brown sugar, and the Cayman rum cake 🍰🥃 that visitors carry home. The creamy Mudslide cocktail 🍹 is said to have been first mixed at the Wreck Bar at Rum Point.

Pirates Week 🏴‍☠️⚔️💰 fills November with costumed pirates landing on George Town's waterfront, street dances, a heritage day in each district and fireworks 🎆. Batabano 🎭💃🥁🪶 is Cayman's carnival, held in May, with costumed bands parading through the streets of Grand Cayman; its name is an old Caymanian word for the tracks turtles leave in the sand as they come ashore to nest. At Christmas 🎄 families keep the old custom of the sand yard, spreading fresh white beach sand over their yards. In sport, people send 🏏 for cricket, ⚽ for football, 🏊 for the islands' Olympic swimmers and 🏃 for the Cayman Islands Marathon in December. Many Caymanians have family ties to Jamaica 🇯🇲, and as a British Overseas Territory the islands share the King and the Union Jack with the United Kingdom 🇬🇧; neighbours with their own collections include Jamaica, Bermuda and the Turks and Caicos Islands.