Chile Emoji & Symbols

The Chile flag emoji 🇨🇱 shows la Estrella Solitaria, the Lone Star: a white band over a red one, with a blue square holding a single white star at the top by the pole. The flag was adopted on 18 October 1817, during the war of independence. The usual reading is red for the blood shed for independence, white for the snow of the Andes and blue for the sky; the star is read as a guide to progress and honour.

Like every country flag, 🇨🇱 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇨 and 🇱, the country code CL. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so the same emoji shows there as the letters CL. Copy it anyway: anyone reading on a phone sees the flag.

Where flags do not display, ❤️🤍💙 spells out the colours, and ⭐ or the plain text star ★ stands for the Estrella Solitaria. Because the Texas state flag also has one white star on blue next to white and red, and Texas's flag tag sequence has limited support, people outside Chile often borrow 🇨🇱 for Texas. Chileans notice.

The coat of arms holds a shield with the Lone Star between a condor and a huemul, under the motto Por la razón o la fuerza, "by reason or by force". There is no condor emoji, so 🦅 stands in; 🦌 is the nearest to the huemul, the stocky deer of the southern Andes, now an endangered species.

The national flower is the copihue, a red bell-shaped flower of the southern forests. There is no copihue emoji either; 🌺 is the closest red flower on the keyboard. The national dance is the cueca 💃🕺, and rayuela is the only sport legally recognized as national; Chilean rodeo 🤠🐎 is often called the national sport. The national anthem is sung at every Dieciocho.

Chile emoji meaning: the country, not the pepper 🌶️

Search for "chile emoji" and much of what comes back is 🌶️. That is because in Mexican Spanish and in American English a chile is a chili pepper, and 🌶️ is officially named hot pepper. The country's name has nothing to do with the pepper; where it comes from is still debated, and most theories look to a word in an Andean or Mapuche language. If you want the country, the emoji is 🇨🇱.

The pepper does have a place on a Chilean table, though. 🌶️ is merkén, the smoked ground chili of the Mapuche, now sold all over the country, and with 🍅🧅 it is pebre, the fresh salsa served with bread before an asado. Chileans themselves call the pepper ají.

Fiestas Patrias: Chile emoji for the Dieciocho

Chile's biggest holiday is the Dieciocho, 18 September, when the country celebrates the first national government junta of 1810; 19 September, the Day of the Glories of the Army, comes straight after, so the party lasts days. People send ¡Felices Fiestas Patrias! 🇨🇱 or ¡Viva Chile! 🇨🇱🎉 and head to the fondas and ramadas, open-air halls of food stalls, music and dancing.

💃🕺 is the cueca, danced by a couple each waving a white handkerchief, the man often dressed as a huaso, the Chilean horseman, with a straw hat and a short poncho, which is why 🤠 and 🐎 belong here. 🎸🪗 are the guitar and accordion of the cueca bands. 🪁 is the volantín: September is kite season, and the sky over every park fills with them.

To eat and drink there are 🥟 empanadas de pino, baked pastries filled with beef, onion, egg and an olive, 🥩🔥 the asado, 🍷 red wine and the terremoto, "earthquake", a glass of young sweet wine with a scoop of pineapple ice cream 🍍🍨, named for what it does to your legs.

Chilean food emoji: empanadas, completos, seafood and wine

🌭🥑🍅 is the completo, the Chilean hot dog piled with avocado, tomato and mayonnaise; with those three toppings it is a completo italiano, for the colours of the Italian flag. Chileans put 🥑 palta on almost everything. 🌽 is choclo, the corn of pastel de choclo, a baked corn pie over meat, and 🫔 is the closest emoji to humitas, corn paste steamed in its own husks. 🍅🧅 together are the ensalada chilena.

🍞☕ is once, the evening tea with bread, avocado and ham that takes the place of dinner in many homes; Chileans eat some of the most bread in the world, above all the crusty marraqueta. In the far south 🧉 mate is drunk as it is across the border in Argentina.

The long coast gives 🐟 fish and salmon, 🦀 centolla, the king crab of Patagonia, 🦞 the lobster of the Juan Fernández Islands and 🦪 shellfish such as machas and mussels, which go into the curanto of Chiloé, cooked in a pit of hot stones. 🍷🍇 is Chilean wine, Carménère above all, and 🍸🍋 the pisco sour, made with pisco and lemon; Chile and Peru both claim pisco. In summer people drink mote con huesillo, dried peaches 🍑 in their syrup over cooked wheat, and 🍒 are a summer export: most of Chile's cherries are shipped to China for Chinese New Year.

Chilean peso symbol $ and the Spanish letters ñ á ¿

The Chilean peso symbol is the ordinary dollar sign $, and the currency code is CLP. Prices are written $5.000 or $ 5.000, with a dot for thousands, and in practice without decimals. To tell pesos from US dollars, Chileans write US$ for dollars. In speech, 1.000 pesos is una luca. The ₱ sign is the Philippine peso, not Chile's.

Chile's language is Spanish, spoken by nearly all of its roughly 19 million people (an estimate). It writes the same letters as all Spanish: á é í ó ú mark the stressed syllable, ü is sounded in güe and güi (pingüino, and Chile has plenty of penguins 🐧), and ñ is a letter of its own, as in ñandú. Questions and exclamations open with ¿ and ¡.

On Windows hold Alt and type on the number pad 0225 for á, 0233 é, 0237 í, 0243 ó, 0250 ú, 0252 ü, 0241 ñ, 0209 Ñ, 0191 ¿ and 0161 ¡. On a Mac press Option + E then the vowel for an acute accent, Option + N then n for ñ, Option + U then u for ü, Option + Shift + ? for ¿ and Option + 1 for ¡. On a phone, long-press the letter. The full set is in our Spanish letters collection.

Mapuche, Rapa Nui and the land from the Atacama to Patagonia

The Mapuche are Chile's largest Indigenous people, and their language, Mapudungun, has well over 100,000 speakers, and by some counts close to 300,000 (estimates vary with who is counted). It is written with Latin letters, including ü for a vowel of its own and ñ, as in the greeting mari mari and in küme, good. Among Mapuche symbols, 🪘 stands for the kultrun, the drum of the machi, the healer, whose painted face shows the world divided into four parts; ✴️ is close to the guñelve, the eight-pointed star of the morning star, Venus, woven into textiles and worked in silver; 🌲 is the pewen, the araucaria, whose seeds are a staple of the Pewenche. The Mapuche new year, We Tripantu, falls at the winter solstice in June, and since 2021 Chile has a national holiday for its Indigenous peoples on that day. See our Mapuche collection for the language.

🗿 the moai is Chile too: Easter Island, Rapa Nui, 3,700 kilometres out in the Pacific, has been Chilean since 1888. Its Polynesian people carved close to a thousand of these stone figures, and the island's national park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Online, 🗿 is also a meme for a deadpan, stone-faced reaction, but on Rapa Nui it is the ancestors. 🏝️🌺 complete the island.

Chile is about 4,300 kilometres long, so its emoji run from 🏜️ the Atacama, the driest non-polar desert on Earth, with 🦩 flamingos on its salt flats and 🦙 llamas, alpacas and vicuñas in the altiplano, to 🏞️🧊 the granite towers and glaciers of Torres del Paine, 🐧 penguins, 🐋 whales and 🦭 sea lions at the far end of the continent. The dry, clear skies of the north hold many of the world's biggest telescopes, which is why 🔭🌌🌠 are Chilean emoji too.

Along the whole length rise the Andes 🏔️⛰️, with ski resorts above Santiago ⛷️ and dozens of active volcanoes 🌋 such as Villarrica and Osorno. 🌊🏖️🏄 are the Pacific beaches of Viña del Mar and the surf of Pichilemu. ⛏️ is copper, mined in the north: Chile is the world's largest producer, and in 2010 the whole country watched 33 miners brought up alive after 69 days underground.

🏙️ is Santiago under the Andes, 🏘️ the colourful hillside houses of Valparaíso, and ⛪ the wooden churches of Chiloé, also UNESCO-listed. ⚽🏆 is La Roja, which won the Copa América in 2015 and 2016, beating Argentina in the final both times; 🎾🥇 is tennis, where Marcelo Ríos reached world number one and Nicolás Massú and Fernando González won Chile's first Olympic gold medals in Athens in 2004. 📚 is for Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, Chile's two Nobel Prize-winning poets.