Coffee & Tea Emoji

☕ is the coffee emoji everyone means, but its official Unicode name is Hot Beverage, and that neutral name is deliberate: the same character stands for coffee, black tea with milk or hot chocolate, and every platform draws it as a plain cup with steam rising, so your reader sees whatever they drink in the morning. It is older than most emoji: U+2615 was encoded in Unicode 4.0 in 2003, seven years before the Japanese phone emoji arrived. 🍵 Teacup Without Handle came with that Japanese set in 2010; it shows green tea in a handleless cup, which is why it is also the matcha emoji: there is no separate one, and 🍵 is what matcha cafés and tea drinkers use.

The newer cups are specific drinks. 🫖 Teapot (2020) is a proper pot for brewing, the emoji for tea time and afternoon tea. 🧋 Bubble Tea, the boba emoji (2020), is a milk tea with tapioca pearls and a fat straw, the drink that started in Taiwan in the 1980s. 🧉 Mate (2019) is the gourd and metal straw of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil. For an iced coffee emoji there is nothing official yet, so people use 🥤 Cup with Straw, often with 🧊 Ice, or 🧋 when the cup is tall and milky. 🥛 Glass of Milk is the oat, almond or cow's milk going into the latte, and 🧃 Beverage Box covers the carton on the breakfast table.

Coffee emoji meaning: from a guy, from a girl, as a reaction

On its own, ☕ is an invitation or a greeting. "Coffee?" with a single ☕ is the lowest-pressure date there is, from a guy or a girl alike: a daytime meeting that can stay a chat or turn into something more. In a good-morning text ☕ means "I'm up, thinking of you", and ☕☕☕ or 🥱☕ means "I'm not awake yet". In a work chat ☕ at 10 am is a break and 🪫☕ is the honest state of the team before it. People also tag ☕ onto a payment to say "that's for the coffee you bought me".

As a reaction, ☕ borrows from the tea emoji and means sipping quietly while something unfolds: "I'm just watching", "that's none of my business". The best-known form is 🐸☕, the Kermit the Frog photo with a cup of Lipton tea that became the "But that's none of my business" meme in 2014. The reply "women ☕" or "men ☕" is a dismissive little sip and head-shake; it comes from a 2017 Team Fortress 2 video in which two characters laugh and drink coffee, and spread as a comment format in 2022. 🍵 carries gossip: spill the tea means tell me everything, and "tea" for truth comes out of Black and Latino drag culture, where "what's the T?" was asked long before RuPaul's Drag Race carried it to everyone. 👀🍵 is waiting for the gossip, 🤭🍵 is enjoying it, 🫗 is the tea being spilled.

Coffee emoji combos for mornings, café captions and coffee dates

A good coffee emoji combo pairs one cup with one or two things around it. Morning: ⏰☕🌅 for the alarm and the first cup, 🥱☕⚡ for "caffeine, then a person", 😴☕😌 for the before and after. Breakfast: ☕🥐 is the classic café breakfast, ☕🥯 the deli one, 🍳🥞☕ a proper weekend plate, 🥣🧃 the quick one. For a coffee date, ☕🤎 or ☕🥐🤎 says warm without saying too much; 🤎 Brown Heart is the heart coffee lovers reach for because it matches the cup.

Café and study captions lean on books, rain and a window: 📖☕🌧️ for a rainy reading afternoon, 💻☕📓 for working from a café, 🛋️🕯️☕ for staying in, 🍂☕ for the first cold week of autumn and anything pumpkin-spiced. Tea has its own set: 🫖🍪 for a cup and a biscuit, 🍵🍡 for Japanese tea sweets, 🍵🥮 for the mid-autumn table, ☕🫚🍯🍋 for the ginger, honey and lemon tea you make when a cold is coming, 🧋🥤 for a bubble tea run and 🧉☀️ for mate in the sun. Keep combos to three or four characters; the cup should still be the first thing you see.

Tea emoji around the world: 🫖 🍵 🧉 🧋 and what to eat with them

Each tea emoji carries a place. 🫖 is the British and Irish pot, the one for afternoon tea, a cuppa and "put the kettle on". 🍵 is East Asia: Japanese green tea and matcha, Chinese tea served without handles or milk, which is also why Japanese tea sweets 🍡 dango, 🍘 rice cracker and the Chinese 🥮 mooncake sit beside it. 🧉 is the shared gourd of mate, passed around a circle and refilled from a thermos. 🧋 is Taiwan's bubble tea, now the tea most often photographed by people under thirty. For masala chai or any spiced tea there is no emoji of its own, so ☕🫚 (ginger) or 🫖🥛 do the job.

The word itself travelled from the character 茶. Nearly every language took its name for tea from Chinese: "te" by sea, from Min Nan speakers in Fujian whose pronunciation Dutch traders carried to Europe, and "cha" or "chai" overland through Persia and Central Asia. 茶 is in the grid as a text symbol because it reads as "tea" to more than a billion people and looks good in a username or a tea-shop bio. What goes in the cup has emoji too: 🫘 Beans is the only coffee bean emoji (it arrived in 2021 and is drawn as kidney beans on most platforms, but it is what coffee roasters use), 🍯 honey and 🍋 lemon for tea, 🍫 for hot chocolate and mocha, 🍃 🌿 for tea leaves, mint and herbal infusions.

Coffee symbol text: ☕︎ ⛾ ♨ and how to type the coffee emoji

If a colour emoji is too loud, ☕ has a monochrome twin: the same character followed by the text variation selector, ☕︎, which many fonts draw as a plain black outline cup. ⛾ Cup on Black Square is a true text symbol: a steaming cup set in a dark square, encoded in Unicode 5.2 in 2009 from the symbol set of Japanese digital television, where such pictograms mark places on maps; Unicode lists it among its beverage symbols, with the alias "drive-in restaurant". ♨ Hot Springs is the Japanese map sign for an onsen, three wisps of steam rising from a bath, and it doubles as the steam over any hot drink, as in the kaomoji ( ˘▽˘)っ♨. The oldest text coffee mug is typed with ordinary characters: c[_] or c[~], a handle and a cup.

To type ☕ on a phone, open the emoji keyboard and search "coffee" or "tea"; on Windows press the Windows key and the period, on a Mac Control + Command + Space, and search the same words. In Slack, Discord and GitHub the shortcodes are :coffee: for ☕, :tea: for 🍵, :teapot: for 🫖, :bubble_tea: for 🧋 and :mate: for 🧉. In HTML, ☕ is ☕ or ☕. Or tap any cup in the grid above: it copies on its own.