Egypt Emoji & Symbols

🇪🇬 the Egyptian flag is the first Egypt emoji: pride, a match of the national team, a trip, or simply where you come from. Its three bands work as hearts too, ❤️🤍🖤, and the golden bird in the middle, the Eagle of Saladin, is as close as emoji get with 🦅. The flag in its present form dates from 1984.

Unicode has no pyramid, sphinx, mummy or pharaoh emoji, so people build Egypt from what exists. 🔺 or △ stand in for the pyramids, usually next to 🐪 and 🏜️: 🐪🔺🏜️ reads as Giza at a glance. 👑 is the pharaoh, 🏺 the treasures of the tombs, 🏛️ the temple columns of Karnak and Luxor, 📜 a papyrus. For a real pyramid, use the hieroglyph 𓉴, and 𓉶 for an obelisk.

🐈 Cat and 🪲 Beetle are the most Egyptian animals in the emoji keyboard. Cats were kept, loved and even mummified in ancient Egypt, and the goddess Bastet had a cat's head; the Egyptian word for cat was miu. The scarab, a dung beetle rolling its ball, stood for the sun god Khepri pushing the sun across the sky. 🐊 is Sobek, the crocodile god of the Nile, 🐍 the cobra on the pharaoh's crown, and ☥ the ankh, the sign of life, which also exists as an ordinary text symbol.

Egyptian flag emoji: copy and paste 🇪🇬, and why Windows shows EG

The Egyptian flag emoji is two regional indicator letters, 🇪 and 🇬, the country code EG, which phones and Macs draw as the red, white and black flag. Windows has no country flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC the same emoji shows as the letters EG. Copy it anyway: anyone reading on a phone sees the flag. On Discord you can type :flag_eg:.

The flag is everywhere on 25 January, the anniversary of the 2011 revolution, on 23 July, Egypt's national day, which marks the revolution of 1952, on 6 October, the day of the 1973 Suez Canal crossing, and on any night the national team wins. For neighbouring flags, 🇸🇩 Sudan, 🇱🇾 Libya, 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia and the rest, see our Flag Emoji collection.

Egyptian hieroglyphs copy and paste: 𓋹 𓂀 𓆣 and the hieroglyph alphabet

Hieroglyphs are real text characters: Unicode 5.2 added more than a thousand of them in 2009, and Unicode 16.0 added almost 4,000 more in 2024. Their names come from the sign list the Egyptologist Alan Gardiner published in 1927, so the Eye of Horus is D10 and the ankh S34. Most phones and computers now ship a font for the basic set; if you see empty boxes, install the free Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs font.

The Egyptian symbols people copy most, and what they meant: 𓋹 ankh, life, held by the gods to the pharaoh's nose; 𓂀 the Eye of Horus (the wedjat), protection and healing; 𓆣 the scarab, the word kheper, "to come into being"; 𓊽 the djed pillar, stability, the backbone of Osiris; 𓌀 the was sceptre, power; 𓋾 the crook and 𓌅 the flail, the royal insignia held by Osiris and the kings; 𓇳 the sun disc of Ra, 𓅃 the falcon of Horus, 𓆄 the feather of Maat, truth, against which the heart was weighed. 𓍷 is the cartouche, the oval ring drawn around a king's name.

To write your name in hieroglyphs, use the alphabet in the grid: the 24 signs that each represent one consonant, from 𓄿 the vulture (a glottal sound written ꜣ) and 𓇋 the reed (i) to 𓃀 the foot (b), 𓅓 the owl (m), 𓈖 water (n), 𓂋 the mouth (r), 𓋴 folded cloth (s), 𓏏 the bread loaf (t) and 𓆓 the cobra (dj). Egyptian writing generally left vowels unmarked, so pick the sign for each consonant and skip most vowels, the way scribes did. Real words often add a sign for meaning at the end: Ra is 𓂋𓂝𓇳, r + ꜥ + the sun disc, and ankh is spelled 𓋹𓈖𓐍.

Ramadan, Eid and Egyptian holiday emoji

In Ramadan Egyptian streets fill with the fanous, the coloured metal-and-glass lantern children carry and families hang over doors and balconies. There is no fanous emoji; 🏮 (red paper lantern) is the one people use, with 🌙, 🕌, ☪️, 🤲 for dua and 📿 for the prayer beads. The greeting is Ramadan Kareem, رمضان كريم, and the reply Allahu akram.

For Eid al-Fitr Egyptians bake kahk, butter cookies dusted with sugar 🍪, and for Eid al-Adha 🐑 stands for the sacrifice; then come 🎉🎆. The all-purpose Egyptian wish for any holiday or birthday is kol sana w enta tayeb, كل سنة وانت طيب, "may you be well every year".

Egypt's Coptic Christians, the largest Christian community in the Middle East, celebrate Christmas on 7 January, a public holiday: ✝️⛪. On the Monday after Coptic Easter the whole country goes out for Sham el-Nessim, a spring festival with roots in ancient Egypt: picnics in parks and on the Nile, coloured eggs 🥚, salted fish (feseekh) 🐟, green onions and flowers 🌸. 🧿, the blue eye bead against the evil eye, hangs in cars and shops across Egypt.

Egyptian food, the Nile, the Red Sea and football emoji

Breakfast is 🫘 ful medames, slow-cooked fava beans, with 🧆 ta'ameya, the Egyptian falafel made from fava beans rather than chickpeas, and 🫓 aish baladi, the round brown flatbread. The national dish, koshari, is rice, lentils, macaroni and chickpeas under tomato sauce and fried onions: 🍚🍝🍅🧅. 🥬🍲 is molokhia, the green soup, 🥙 shawarma, 🥭 and 🍉 the summer fruit, 🍮 for desserts like om ali and rice pudding. Tea is strong and sweet, often with mint 🫖🌿, coffee ☕ is drunk in the ahwa, the street café, and 🌺 is karkadeh, hibiscus tea served cold in summer.

⛵ is the felucca, the white-sailed boat of Aswan and Cairo, and 🛳️ a Nile cruise between Luxor and Aswan; 🌅🌴 is the Nile at sunset. 🌾 🐃 🫏 are the fields, water buffalo and donkeys of the Delta and the valley villages. On the Red Sea coast, in Hurghada, Sharm el-Sheikh, Dahab and Marsa Alam, it is 🏖️ 🤿 🐠 🪸 🐬: some of the world's best-known coral reefs. Cairo is 🏙️ 🌃 🚕 and 🚇: its metro, opened in 1987, was the first in Africa.

⚽ is the national passion. The team, nicknamed the Pharaohs, has won the Africa Cup of Nations seven times, more than any other country, and 👑 is also Mohamed Salah, "the Egyptian King" of Liverpool fans' songs. The Cairo derby is 🔴 Al Ahly against ⚪ Zamalek. 🤾 is handball, in which Egypt hosted the 2021 world championship. 🎤 stands for Umm Kulthum, the "Star of the East", 🪘 for the tabla and darbuka drums, 💃 for raqs sharqi, and 🎬 for Egyptian cinema, the reason Egyptian Arabic is understood across the Arab world.

Egyptian symbols in text: the pound sign E£, Arabic letters and digits

The Latin form E£ is a two-character string; Unicode encodes ࢐ (U+0890, ARABIC POUND MARK ABOVE) and ࢑ (U+0891, ARABIC PIASTRE MARK ABOVE) for Egyptian amounts over digits in Arabic text. It is written E£ or LE (from French livre égyptienne) in Latin text and ج.م (geneh masri) in Arabic; the code is EGP, and one pound is 100 piastres (qirsh). For £ on Windows hold Alt and type 0163 on the number pad, on a US Mac press Option + 3; in HTML it is £.

Arabic is the official language, spoken by about 105 million people in Egypt by CLDR's estimate, and about 71 million are counted for Egyptian Arabic, Masri, the everyday spoken form. Egyptians write it with the same 28 letters as other Arabic speakers, right to left, but read some differently: ج is a hard g, so camel is gamal (جمل), and in Cairo ق is usually a catch in the throat. Final ي is very often written dotless, as ى. Egypt itself is مصر, Masr. In chats many Egyptians write Arabic in Latin letters with digits for sounds English lacks: 2 for ء, 3 for ع, 5 for خ, 7 for ح.

Numbers in Egypt are usually written with the Eastern Arabic digits ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩, on prices, car plates and one side of every banknote, and Arabic text uses its own comma ،, question mark ؟ and semicolon ؛. To type them, add the Arabic (Egypt) keyboard in Windows Settings under Time & language and switch with Win + Space, add Arabic under Keyboard input sources on a Mac, or add an Arabic keyboard on your phone. The full alphabet with its vowel marks is in our Arabic and Egyptian Arabic collections.

Ancient Egyptian did not die with the pharaohs: its last stage, Coptic, was written in the Greek alphabet plus six or seven letters taken from Demotic script, such as ϣ (sh) and ϥ (f), and it survives mainly as a liturgical language in the Coptic Church rather than as an everyday spoken language. English is widely taught, and Greek is still heard in Alexandria. See our Coptic, English and Greek collections.