Czech Emoji

The Czech flag emoji 🇨🇿 shows a white stripe over a red one with a blue triangle reaching in from the hoist. White and red are the old colours of Bohemia; the blue wedge was added when the flag was adopted for Czechoslovakia in 1920. When the federation split peacefully on 1 January 1993, the Czech Republic kept the flag, and Slovakia 🇸🇰 took its own. Fans who want the colours without the flag line up hearts 🤍❤️💙 or squares ⬜🟥🟦.

Like every country flag, 🇨🇿 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇨 + 🇿 for the country code CZ. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters CZ instead. Paste it anyway: an iPhone or Android user sees 🇨🇿. Unicode calls it "flag: Czechia", the short English name the country registered in 2016; "Czech Republic" remains the full official name, so people search for both.

The lion 🦁 is the heart of the coat of arms: the silver Bohemian lion with two tails, crowned in gold, on a red shield. The full arms add two eagles 🦅, the red-and-white checkered eagle of Moravia and the black eagle of Silesia. 👑 stands for the St Wenceslas Crown, kept in St Vitus Cathedral at Prague Castle, and also for the money, because koruna means crown. The national tree is the linden (lípa) 🌳, whose heart-shaped leaves are a favourite patriotic motif. 🇪🇺 belongs here too: Czechia joined the European Union in 2004.

Czech food and beer emoji

🍺 🍻 are the classic Czech emoji, and with reason: the golden pilsner was first brewed in Plzeň (Pilsen) in 1842, and Czechs have for years drunk more beer per person than anyone else in the world. The town of České Budějovice, Budweis in German, gave its name to Budweiser. In a pub (hospoda) a beer is a pivo, and the toast is Na zdraví!.

The national plate is vepřo knedlo zelo, roast pork 🍖 with dumplings 🥟 and sauerkraut 🥬. The emoji dumpling is an Asian one, but Czechs use it for knedlíky, the sliced bread dumplings that come with almost everything, including svíčková (beef in cream sauce) and roast duck 🦆. On St Martin's Day, 11 November, the dish is roast goose 🪿 with the first young wine. 🍲 is goulash (guláš) or soup, and 🧄 is česnečka, the garlic soup that is said to cure a hangover.

Street food is 🧀🍟, smažený sýr, a slab of fried cheese with chips and tartar sauce, and 🌭 párek v rohlíku, a sausage pushed into a bread roll. For something sweet there are 🥞 palačinky (thin pancakes), 🥧 koláče, the round filled pastries that Czech immigrants took to Texas as kolaches, and 🍪 the gingerbread of Pardubice. 🍷 is the wine of South Moravia, where most Czech vineyards are, and 🥃 covers slivovice plum brandy and Becherovka, the herbal liqueur of Karlovy Vary.

Prague emojis and places to see

Prague has a set of its own. 🏰 is Prague Castle above the Vltava, one of the largest castle complexes in the world, with ⛪ St Vitus Cathedral inside its walls; it works just as well for Karlštejn or the castle town of Český Krumlov. 🌉 is Charles Bridge, begun in 1357, and 🕰️ the astronomical clock (orloj) on the Old Town Hall, first installed in 1410 and the oldest such clock still working. 🕍 is the Old-New Synagogue, the oldest active synagogue in Europe, home of the Golem legend, and 🚊 the red trams that rattle through the centre.

Outside the capital, 💀 is the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, a chapel decorated with the bones of tens of thousands of people, chandelier included. ♨️ stands for the spa towns of West Bohemia, Karlovy Vary and Mariánské Lázně, where visitors sip the hot mineral water from spouted cups. ⛰️ is Sněžka, the highest mountain at 1,603 m, 🪨🏞️ the sandstone towers of Bohemian Switzerland and Bohemian Paradise, with Pravčická brána, the largest natural sandstone arch in Europe, and 🌲 the Šumava forest.

The Czech weekend has emoji too. Picking mushrooms 🍄🧺 is a national pastime, and on Friday afternoons cities empty towards the chata or chalupa, the family cottage in the country 🏡. In summer, groups of vodáci paddle canoes 🛶 down the Vltava and the Sázava.

Czech holidays and the emoji people send

Christmas is Czech in its own way. Presents 🎁 are brought on the evening of 24 December by Ježíšek, the baby Jesus 👼, not by Santa. In the days before, live carp 🐟 are sold from big tubs on the streets, and many families keep theirs in the bathtub 🛁 until it is time to cook it. Christmas Eve dinner is fried carp with potato salad 🥔, after a table of homemade biscuits (cukroví) 🍪. To see the year ahead, people cut an apple 🍎 across the middle: a star of seeds means health, a cross means bad luck. On the evening of 5 December St Nicholas (Mikuláš) walks the streets with an angel 👼 and a devil (čert) 😈, handing sweets to children who have been good.

Easter is 🥚🎀: on Easter Monday boys go from house to house with a pomlázka, a braided willow switch, and playfully whip the girls for health and youth; the girls give painted eggs (kraslice) and tie ribbons to the switch. On 30 April, Witches' Night (pálení čarodějnic), bonfires 🔥 burn straw witches 🧙. On 1 May lovers kiss 💋 under a blossoming cherry tree 🌸, a custom tied to Karel Hynek Mácha's poem Máj, and New Year's Eve (Silvestr) ends with 🎆🥂.

Two days in autumn belong to the country itself. 28 October marks the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918: 🇨🇿 is the obvious emoji. 17 November is Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Day; in 1989 it began the Velvet Revolution, when crowds on Wenceslas Square jingled their keys 🔑 to tell the communist government it was time to go. People still light candles 🕯️ on that day on Národní třída in Prague.

Czech sports, music and inventions

Ice hockey 🏒 is the sport that stops the country. The Olympic gold 🥇 at Nagano in 1998 brought people onto the streets at night, and the men's team won the 2024 World Championship 🏆 at home in Prague. In football ⚽, Czechoslovakia won the 1976 European Championship, decided by Antonín Panenka's softly chipped penalty, now called a "Panenka" everywhere. 🎾 is a long line of tennis champions from Martina Navratilova and Ivan Lendl to Petra Kvitová, 🏃 Emil Zátopek, who won the 5,000 m, the 10,000 m and the marathon at the 1952 Olympics, and 🏂 Ester Ledecká, who won Olympic gold in skiing and snowboarding at the same Games in 2018.

🎻🎼 are Antonín Dvořák, composer of the New World Symphony, and Bedřich Smetana, whose Vltava follows the river through Bohemia. 🎭 is the theatre, and the playwright Václav Havel, who became president after 1989. 🤖 is a Czech word: Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R. introduced "robot", a name his brother Josef suggested, from robota, forced labour. 🪲 is for Franz Kafka of Prague, whose Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant insect, usually drawn as a beetle. 💎 is Bohemian crystal and the deep red Bohemian garnet, 🚗 Škoda, made in Mladá Boleslav since its start as Laurin & Klement in 1895.

Czech letters, the koruna Kč and how to type them

Czechia has about 10.9 million people, and CLDR estimates that about 11 million people in Czechia speak Czech. The same estimates count about 2.9 million English speakers, about 1.7 million Slovak speakers, reflecting the shared Czechoslovak past, and about 1.6 million German speakers. Czech and Slovak are close enough that speakers understand each other without lessons. The alphabet, with what every letter sounds like, is in the Czech language collection; for the neighbours see the Slovakia, Germany, Austria and Poland collections, and the Slovak and Polish language pages.

Czech writes with A–Z plus 15 letters: Á É Í Ó Ú Ý with the čárka (acute), which makes the vowel long, Č Ď Ě Ň Ř Š Ť Ž with the háček, and Ů with the kroužek (ring). Length changes meaning: byt is a flat, být "to be". Ů and Ú sound the same, a long u; Ú usually appears at the start of a word or root (úterý, Tuesday; neúspěch, failure), while Ů never begins a word (dům, house). Ř is the famous one, a trilled r pronounced together with a sound like the s in "pleasure", as in the name Dvořák. In small ď and ť the háček looks like an apostrophe, but it is the same mark. The háček itself goes back to the spelling reform traditionally credited to Jan Hus in the early 15th century, and it has since spread to Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian and Lithuanian.

On a Czech keyboard the number row types + ě š č ř ž ý á í é, with ú and ů on the keys right of P and L. On Windows without the Czech layout, Alt codes cover only some letters: Á 0193, á 0225, É 0201, é 0233, Í 0205, í 0237, Ó 0211, ó 0243, Ú 0218, ú 0250, Ý 0221, ý 0253, Š 0138, š 0154, Ž 0142, ž 0158; for Č, Ř, Ě, Ů and the rest, add the Czech keyboard or copy them from this page. On a Mac, the ABC – Extended input source adds the háček with Option+V and the acute with Option+E, followed by the letter. On phones, long-press c, r, s, z, e or u. In HTML, č, ř, š, ž, ě and ů work.

Czech quotation marks open low and close high, „takto“, with ‚takto‘ inside a quote; some books use »takto« with the points facing inward. The currency is the Czech koruna, code CZK, which has no Unicode sign: it is written Kč, for koruna česká, after the number with a space, as in 100 Kč. Czechia is in the EU but has not adopted the euro.