Devil & Demon Emoji

😈 smiling face with horns is the devil emoji almost everyone means. It is a grinning purple face with two small horns, and in texting it stands for mischief rather than evil: "I have a plan", "I'm about to be bad", a dare, a joke at someone's expense. Because the grin is sly, it is also the most common flirty emoji after 😏 and 🫦. From a guy or a girl in a late-night chat, 😈 usually means they are teasing, feeling naughty or hinting at something they would not say in words, and 😈🔥 or 😈💋 makes that hint plain.

👿 angry face with horns is the same face with the mouth turned down, drawn red on most platforms and a darker purple on some. Its original Unicode name is simply Imp, and it reads as genuinely cross or spiteful: "I'm furious", "you'll regret that", the evil twin of 😡. People searching for a red devil emoji want 👿; the purple devil emoji is 😈. Both arrived with the first big emoji release in 2010, so they show up everywhere, from old Android phones to Slack.

The pair works as a scale. 😏 is a smirk, 😈 is a smirk with horns, 👿 is anger with horns, and 🤬 is anger that has run out of words. 😼 cat with wry smile and 😾 pouting cat are the same two moods on a cat, handy when 😈 feels too strong.

Demon emoji: ogre, goblin, horns and goats

There is no emoji called demon, so people borrow. 👹 ogre is the red horned mask of the Japanese oni, the demon chased out of the house with beans at the Setsubun festival, and it is the closest thing to a classic red demon face. 👺 goblin is the long-nosed tengu mask, a mountain spirit rather than a devil, but the two travel together as the demon emoji pair. 🦹 supervillain covers a cartoon bad guy, and 🧛 vampire adds fangs and a cape; the full monster cast is on the Halloween Emoji page.

🤘 sign of the horns is the devil horns hand: index and little finger up, the metal and rock-concert salute, also used for "rock on" and for the Texas Longhorns. It came in 2015 and is the hand people mean by "devil horns emoji". 🐐 goat doubles as the horned beast of Baphomet imagery and, in sports chat, as GOAT, greatest of all time, so read the rest of the message before deciding which one you got. The devil's weapon is 🔱 trident, a three-pronged spear that officially belongs to Poseidon and Shiva; the plain text ⋔ pitchfork is really a maths operator, but it draws a pitchfork and works inside usernames where emoji cannot go.

Hellfire, pentagrams and satanic symbols to copy and paste

Hell is fire, so 🔥 fire, ❤️‍🔥 heart on fire, 🌋 volcano, ⚡ high voltage and 💥 collision carry the heat, with 🌶️ hot pepper and 🥵 hot face for the spicy, flirty side of 😈. The alchemists drew fire as a triangle, 🜂, and brimstone, sulfur, as a cross standing on an infinity sign, 🜍. That sulfur sign is better known today as the Leviathan cross or Satan's cross, the mark Anton LaVey used in The Satanic Bible; 🜏 is its double-barred variant. Both are plain text characters from the Alchemical Symbols block, so they paste into bios and Discord names like any letter.

The star that people search for as the satanic symbol is the ⛧ inverted pentagram, point down, the shape inside the Sigil of Baphomet. Point up, ⛤ pentagram is the older protective sign of Wicca and folk magic, and ⛥ and ⛦ are the interlaced right-handed and left-handed versions. A fifth star, 𖤐, fills many goth and "demon core" bios as a pentagram; it is actually a letter of the Bamum script from Cameroon, which is why some phones show it as a box. The rest of the occult set is on the Witch & Magic Emoji and Alchemy Symbols pages.

Unicode has no upside-down cross. The character everyone uses instead is ⸸ turned dagger, a scholarly footnote mark that happens to look like an inverted crucifix, which made it the signature of black-metal lyrics and dark-aesthetic names. 🕱 black skull and crossbones is a text-only skull from the old Wingdings font, and ⚸ Black Moon Lilith is an astrology point named after the demon of Jewish folklore. Line them up, ⛧ ⸸ 🜍 ⸸ ⛧, and you have the divider that goth Tumblr ran on for a decade.

Black hearts, blood and creatures of the dark

The devil's colours are red, purple and black, and the heart emoji follow: 🖤 black heart for the goth or evil version of love, 💜 purple heart to match 😈, and 🌑 new moon, 🌚 new moon face and ⚫ black circle for the dark of night. 🌚 is the "shady" moon, often used for a sly side-eye in exactly the moments 😈 is used.

For the horror end of the scale there is 🩸 drop of blood, 🗡️ dagger, 🔪 kitchen knife, ⚔️ crossed swords and ⛓️ chains, then 💀 skull, ☠️ skull and crossbones, 🪦 headstone and ⚰️ coffin. Remember that 💀 alone now means "I'm dead laughing" far more often than death; the full set, with its slang, is on the Skull & Death Emoji page. The animals of hell and temptation are 🐍 snake, the serpent of Eden and the modern word for a backstabber, 🦇 bat, 🦂 scorpion, 🐲 dragon face and 🐉 dragon, 🕷️ spider with its 🕸️ web, and the 🐈‍⬛ black cat.

Angel and devil, evil eyes and the number 666

The oldest devil emoji combo is the shoulder angel and shoulder devil: 😇 smiling face with halo next to 😈, as in 😇😈 for "torn between good and bad" or 😈😇 for "I look innocent". 👼 baby angel does the same job in a softer tone; the whole heavenly side lives on the Angel Emoji & Symbols page. The three monkeys 🙈 🙉 🙊, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, come from a carving at the Toshogu shrine in Nikko, Japan, and in chat they mean embarrassment, not listening, and keeping a secret.

👁️ eye and 👀 eyes are the watching, judging look, while 🧿 nazar amulet is the blue glass bead that wards off the evil eye in Turkey, Greece and across the Middle East, and 🪬 hamsa is the open-hand charm with the same purpose. Finally the number of the beast: 6️⃣6️⃣6️⃣ from the Book of Revelation, which Western users send as a joke about something being evil. Be careful with it across languages: in Chinese internet slang 666 means "awesome, smooth", because liù sounds like the slang word for impressive, so on WeChat or Douyin a string of sixes is praise, not a curse.