Dog Emoji

🐶 Dog Face is the one most people mean by “the dog emoji”: a round cartoon puppy head with floppy ears, drawn by Apple and Google as a white face with brown ears and a patch over one eye. It works like a sticker and reads as “cute” or “pup”. 🐕 Dog is the whole animal standing side-on, and it reads more like a description: “out with the 🐕”, “adopted a 🐕”. Both were approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 together with 🐩 Poodle, 🐾 Paw Prints and 🐺 Wolf, so they show on every phone made in the last decade.

🐩 Poodle is the only breed with its own character, drawn clipped and groomed in the show style, which is why it shows up in fancy, French or pampered contexts. 🦮 Guide Dog wears a harness with a stiff handle; 🐕‍🦺 Service Dog wears a vest and leash. Apple proposed both in March 2018 in a set of accessibility emoji developed with the American Council of the Blind, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation and the National Association of the Deaf, and they arrived in Emoji 12.0 in 2019. The service dog is not a single character but 🐕 + 🦺 Safety Vest joined by an invisible joiner, so an older device may show it as the two pieces side by side.

🐾 Paw Prints is shared with cats and every other pet, but in practice it is the universal sign for “my dog”: pet accounts, groomers, shelters and vets all use it. 🦴 Bone (Unicode 11.0, 2018) is the classic dog treat and chew, and it doubles as a broken-bone or skeleton emoji in Medical Emoji & Symbols. 🐺 Wolf and 🦊 Fox are the wild cousins; 🦊 was added in 2016 and is also the Firefox mascot. The cat 🐱 is here for the dog-and-cat combos, and has its own Cat Emoji page.

Dog emoji meaning from a girl, a guy or a group chat

Most of the time a 🐶 means exactly what it looks like: affection, loyalty, playfulness, or a nickname for someone who is cuddly and eager. From a girl or a guy a lone 🐶 or 🐾 after a message is friendly and warm, not flirty, and “🐶🐾” next to a name in a bio means the account is about a pet. Pair 🐶 with 🥺 and you have puppy-dog eyes: 🥺 Pleading Face was approved in 2018 with the keyword “puppy eyes”, and 🥺🐶 is the way to beg for something sweetly.

The slang sense is older than emoji: calling someone “a dog” in English means a man who is unfaithful or sleazy, so 🐕 or 🐶 in a gossip thread about an ex can mean exactly that, and “you dog 🐶” as a joke means “you sly thing”. 🐺 Wolf is the lone wolf, a loner or a predator depending on the tone, and 🐺🌕 is howling at the moon. 🦊 calls someone sly or, from a girl, attractive. In crypto and meme circles the dog stands for Doge and Dogecoin: the meme photo of Kabosu the Shiba Inu was posted by her owner in 2010, the “such wow” meme peaked in July 2013 and the coin launched that December.

🐕 is also one of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals, so it fills chats every Year of the Dog (2018 was the last one, the next is 2030), and the full set of twelve full-body animals is on the Chinese New Year Emoji page. 💩 belongs to dog life too: it is the poop-bag joke of every morning walk.

What the dog emoji looks like on iPhone, Android and the rest

Nobody agrees on the breed. Apple's 🐕 is a reddish-brown Shiba Inu type after a redesign, having started out looking like an Akita; Google's is a beagle, and earlier Google versions were a puppy with a collar. Samsung, Microsoft and WhatsApp each draw their own dog, so a message about “my little white 🐕” may show a brown dog on the other end. 🐶 Dog Face is more consistent across vendors because it is a cartoon rather than a breed, and on iPhone it is one of the faces available as an Animoji.

🦮 and 🐕‍🦺 are the ones to check if you are on an older phone or a Discord server with custom fonts: they need Emoji 12.0 support, so phones from before late 2019 show a blank box or the two separate pieces 🐕 🦺. For a Discord server emoji, the standard 🐶 works everywhere; servers that want a specific breed upload their own custom image.

Dog text symbols and kaomoji

There is no single-character dog symbol in Unicode outside the emoji, so a “dog text symbol” is a kaomoji built from letters and punctuation. The best-known is U・ᴥ・U: two capital U for the ears, Japanese middle dots for the eyes and ᴥ, a phonetic letter called ain, for the nose. ∪･ω･∪ uses the set-union sign for ears and a Greek omega for a dog's mouth, and (U ᵒ ꈊ ᵒ U), ૮ ・ﻌ・ა and ▼・ᴥ・▼ are other common dog faces. The bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ shares the same nose. All of these are plain text and survive on sites, usernames and games that strip emoji.

More faces are on the Kaomoji Symbols page, where you can also build your own with the kaomoji maker, and the Cute & Kawaii Symbols page has the ears and paws. For a pawprint without emoji, people use ฅ (a Thai letter) at the start of a cat face and 🐾 for a dog, because no plain-text paw exists.