Denmark Emoji

The Danish flag emoji 🇩🇰 shows the Dannebrog, a white Scandinavian cross on red, with the upright of the cross set toward the flagpole. Legend says it fell from the sky on 15 June 1219 during King Valdemar II's battle at Lyndanisse, in today's Estonia, and the flag is widely held to be the oldest national flag still in continuous use. Its cross became the model for the flags of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland. For the colours without the flag, Danes line up hearts ❤️🤍 or squares 🟥⬜.

Like every country flag, 🇩🇰 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇩 + 🇰 for the country code DK. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows, and with it Outlook and many desktop apps, has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters DK instead. The flag is still there: someone reading your message on an iPhone or Android sees 🇩🇰.

Danes probably use their flag more often than people in most other countries do. It flies from garden flagpoles on birthdays, stands in little paper versions on the birthday cake 🎂, and hangs in strings of tiny flags on the Christmas tree 🎄. 👑 stands for one of the world's oldest monarchies; King Frederik X has reigned since his mother, Margrethe II, stepped down in January 2024. The mute swan 🦢, Denmark's second national bird, won a 1984 public vote; the first was the skylark, designated in 1960, and the swan is tied to Hans Christian Andersen's The Ugly Duckling; the beech 🌳 is often called the national tree, and 🌼 the marguerite daisy is the flower of Queen Margrethe's name, used as the sign of the Marguerite Route, a network of scenic roads across the country.

The Kingdom of Denmark also includes the self-governing Faroe Islands 🇫🇴 and Greenland 🇬🇱, which have their own flags and their own collections on this site. Denmark itself joined the European Community in 1973, so 🇪🇺 belongs here too.

Denmark has about 6 million people, and CLDR estimates that about 5.6 million speak Danish. English is spoken very widely (about 5.1 million, by CLDR's estimate), German is learned at school and spoken by the German minority in Southern Jutland, and Swedish is understood by many. For the neighbours see the Germany, Sweden and Norway collections, and the Danish, Swedish and German language pages for their alphabets.

How to type Æ Ø Å and the Danish krone (kr.)

Danish writes with A–Z plus three letters that come at the very end of the alphabet: Æ æ, Ø ø and Å å, in that order. They are full letters, not decorated a's and o's: ø on its own means "island" (as in Ærø), å means a small river, and øl is beer. Danish also writes é to mark stress where it changes the meaning, as in én "one" against en "a", and in borrowed words like allé and idé. Ø is the Danish and Norwegian twin of the Swedish and German Ö; it is not the empty-set sign ∅, which only looks similar.

Before the spelling reform of 1948 Danish wrote Aa where it now writes Å, and the old spelling survives in names: the city of Aarhus went back to Aa in 2011, and in Danish alphabetical order a place name with Aa is still filed under Å at the end. The same reform dropped the German-style capital letter on every noun.

On a Danish keyboard Æ, Ø and Å have their own keys to the right of P and L. Elsewhere on Windows hold Alt and type on the number pad: Æ 0198, æ 0230, Ø 0216, ø 0248, Å 0197, å 0229, É 0201, é 0233. With the US-International layout use AltGr+Z for æ, AltGr+L for ø and AltGr+W for å. On a Mac press Option+' for æ, Option+O for ø and Option+A for å, adding Shift for the capitals. On a phone long-press a for å and æ, and o for ø. In HTML use æ, ø and å (Æ, Ø, Å for capitals).

The Danish krone (DKK, "crown") has no symbol of its own in Unicode: prices are written kr., as in 50 kr., and a krone is 100 øre. Denmark voted against the euro in 2000 and keeps the krone pegged to it. The 1, 2 and 5 krone coins 🪙 have a hole in the middle, though most Danes pay by card 💳 or phone. The Danish keyboard puts the general currency sign ¤ on Shift+4 (Alt+0164 on Windows) and has a ½ and § key at its top left. Danish quotation marks are »citat« in books, pointing inward, with ›citat‹ inside them, while everyday writing uses „citat“ or ”citat”; on Windows » is Alt+0187 and « Alt+0171. The full alphabet is in the Danish language collection.

Denmark emoji for food and drink

🥪 Smørrebrød, the open sandwich on dark rye bread 🍞 (rugbrød), is the classic Danish lunch: pickled herring 🐟, shrimp 🦐 with egg 🥚, or roast pork, eaten with a knife and fork and washed down with a beer 🍺 and a cold snaps 🥃. Skål! 🍻 is the toast, and Copenhagen is home to Carlsberg, founded in 1847.

Denmark has more pigs 🐖 than people, and pork is everywhere: 🌭 for the pølsevogn, the hot dog stand with its red sausages and crispy onions, 🥓 for Danish bacon and 🍖🥔 for flæskesteg, roast pork with crackling, and stegt flæsk med persillesovs, fried pork belly with potatoes and parsley sauce, voted the national dish in 2014. Dairy is the other big farm trade: 🐄🥛🧈🧀 cover the milk, butter and cheeses such as Danish Blue and Havarti.

There is no Danish pastry emoji, so people send 🥐; in Denmark the pastry is called wienerbrød, "Viennese bread", after the Austrian bakers who brought the method in the 19th century. 🍪 is the butter cookie in its blue tin, 🍓 the summer strawberries eaten with cream, and 🎂 the layer cake (lagkage) or the cake man (kagemand) of every birthday, topped with little flags. ☕ matters: Danes are among the heaviest coffee drinkers in the world, and in winter 🍷 is gløgg, mulled wine served with æbleskiver, round pancake balls with jam and icing sugar.

Hygge, Copenhagen and Danish landmarks in emoji

Hygge, the Danish word for cosy togetherness, entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017. There is no hygge emoji, so people build it: 🕯️☕🧶🧦🛋️, candles, coffee, knitting, wool socks and the sofa. Danes are among Europe's heaviest candle burners: European Candle Association figures put Denmark first in 2016, at about 4.3 kg per person, though 2024 market estimates rank Poland, Sweden and Portugal higher.

In Copenhagen, 🧜 the Little Mermaid statue has sat on her rock by the harbour since 1913, a tribute to Hans Christian Andersen 📖, who also wrote The Princess and the Pea 👸🫛. 🎡🎢🎠 is Tivoli Gardens, opened in 1843, while Bakken north of the city, from 1583, is the oldest amusement park still running. 🏘️⚓⛵ is Nyhavn, the canal of coloured houses and old wooden ships. 🏰 fits Amalienborg, where 💂 the Royal Life Guards in bearskin hats change the guard at noon, and Kronborg at Helsingør, the Elsinore of Shakespeare's Hamlet. ⛪ stands for the white village churches of the Lutheran state church.

🧱 LEGO comes from Billund in Jutland; the name is short for leg godt, "play well". Danish design is 🪑 and 💡: Arne Jacobsen's Egg chair, Hans Wegner's chairs and Poul Henningsen's PH lamp. 🌉 is the Øresund Bridge to Sweden or the Great Belt Bridge between the islands, ⛴️ the ferries to the smaller ones. With the sea never far away, 🌊🏖️🦭 cover the long coast, its beaches and the seals of the Wadden Sea, and 🌬️ the wind that drives Danish turbines and supplies around half of the country's electricity.

ᚼ ᛒ and the Vikings. The Jelling stones 🪨, raised in the 10th century and called Denmark's birth certificate, name King Harald Bluetooth, who united Denmark and made the Danes Christian. The Bluetooth logo combines his initials in Younger Futhark runes, ᚼ (H) and ᛒ (B). ⚔️🛡️🪓 are the emoji Danes use for the Viking Age, whose ships are on show at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde.

Danish holidays and the emoji people send

Christmas (jul) peaks on Christmas Eve, 24 December, when families eat roast duck 🦆 or pork, then join hands and dance around the 🎄 singing carols before the presents 🎁 are opened. Dessert is risalamande, rice pudding with whipped cream and almonds under hot cherry sauce 🍚🍒: whoever finds the one whole almond wins the almond present. 🧝 is the nisse, the small house elf who gets a bowl of rice porridge, 🎅 is julemanden, and 🕯️ the calendar candle burned down one mark each day of December. The oldest known woven paper Christmas heart, made by Hans Christian Andersen for the Ørsted family in the mid-19th century, was yellow and green; whether he invented the form is unknown. Today, hearts ❤️🤍 often echo the flag.

At Fastelavn, before Lent, children in costume 🎭 take turns hitting a barrel full of sweets, "beating the cat out of the barrel" 🐈 (the cat is only painted on now); the children who break it open are crowned cat queen and cat king 👑. At Easter 🐣 children send a gækkebrev, a paper-cut letter ✂️ with a rhyme and a snowdrop, signed only with dots: if the receiver cannot guess the sender, they owe them an Easter egg 🥚.

On Sankthans, the evening of 23 June, bonfires 🔥 burn on beaches across the country with a witch 🧙 on top, while everyone sings Midsommervisen. On New Year's Eve Danes watch the monarch's speech at six, eat kransekage, a tower of marzipan rings, pop the 🍾, jump off chairs 🪑 at midnight to leap into the new year, and smash old plates 🍽️ on friends' doorsteps; the bigger the pile, the more friends. Grundlovsdag on 5 June marks the constitution 📜 of 1849.

Denmark emoji for sports and bikes

🚲 Bikes are how Danes get around, and Copenhagen is built for them. 🚴 is also road racing: Copenhagen hosted the start of the 2022 Tour de France, which Jonas Vingegaard won, and he won it again in 2023. In football ⚽, Denmark's greatest day came at Euro 1992, which the team entered late as a replacement and went on to win 🏆; fans sing Vi er røde, vi er hvide, "we are red, we are white".

Handball 🤾 is the sport Denmark dominates: the men won four world championships in a row from 2019 to 2025 and Olympic gold in 2016 and 2024, and the women won three Olympic golds in a row from 1996 to 2004. In badminton 🏸 Viktor Axelsen won Olympic gold in Tokyo and Paris.