Ethiopia Emoji & Symbols

The Ethiopian flag emoji 🇪🇹 shows the green, yellow and red tricolour with the national emblem in the middle: a blue disc carrying a yellow star whose rays spread outward, in use since 1996. Green is usually read as the land and its fertility, yellow as hope and peace, red as the blood shed for the country, and the star as the equality and unity of Ethiopia's peoples. Because Ethiopia kept its independence through the colonial era, apart from the Italian occupation of 1936 to 1941, its colours were taken up across Africa as the Pan-African colours: Ghana, Guinea, Senegal, Mali and others put green, yellow and red on their own flags.

Like every country flag, 🇪🇹 is not a picture but two regional indicator letters, 🇪 and 🇹, the country code ET. Phones and Macs join them into a flag; Windows has no flags in its emoji font and shows the letters ET instead, so people also type the colours: 💚💛❤️ or 🟢🟡🔴. There is no emoji of the older imperial flag, the tricolour with the crowned Lion of Judah carrying a cross-staff, used until 1974 and still loved by many Ethiopians and by Rastafarians; it is written 🇪🇹🦁 or 💚💛❤️🦁👑.

Ethiopian symbols and meanings: fidel, numerals and the cross

Amharic, Tigrinya and several other languages of Ethiopia are written in fidel, the Ge'ez script (Ethiopic in Unicode). It is an abugida: each letter is a consonant with a vowel built in, and every consonant comes in seven forms, so ለ is lä, ሉ lu, ሊ li, ላ la, ሌ le, ል lə or plain l, and ሎ lo. Amharic uses 34 base consonants, from ሀ (hä) to ፐ (pä), plus extra forms with a w sound such as ሏ (lwa), well over 200 letters in all; the grid above shows the base form of each, and the full sets are in the Amharic and Tigrinya collections. The word ሰላም (selam, peace and hello) is three of them.

Fidel has its own punctuation. ። (arat neteb, four dots) ends a sentence, ፣ is the comma and ፤ the semicolon; ፡, two dots, was the word divider of old manuscripts and still appears in titles and on signs, though modern text mostly uses a space. Many writers use the plain ? instead of the rare ፧. The Ge'ez numerals ፩ ፪ ፫ ፬ ፭ ፮ ፯ ፰ ፱ (1 to 9), ፲ ፳ ፴ … ፺ (10 to 90), ፻ (100) and ፼ (10,000) come from Greek letters and have no zero: numbers are built like words, so 2019 is ፳፻፲፱, twenty hundreds and nineteen. Everyday prices and phone numbers use 1 2 3, while calendars, dates, page numbers and church books keep the Ge'ez forms.

Ethiopian Orthodox Christians are the country's largest religious group; the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church traces its origins to the conversion of the Aksumite king Ezana in the 4th century; about a third of the country is Muslim, and Islam reached Ethiopia in its first years, when early followers of the Prophet found refuge at the court of Aksum. There is no separate Ethiopian cross emoji: the lacy, latticed processional and hand crosses of the Church are written ✝️ or ☦️, with ⛪🕯️📿 for church and prayer. 🪨⛪ stands for Lalibela, eleven churches carved down into solid rock in the 12th and 13th centuries, and 📜 for the illuminated Ge'ez manuscripts still kept in monasteries. 🕌 is for the mosques of Harar's walled old town, a UNESCO site, and for Eid.

Ethiopian holidays and the 13-month calendar 📅

Ethiopia counts time its own way. The Ethiopian calendar has twelve months of 30 days and a thirteenth, Pagume, of five or six days, which is where the tourism slogan "13 months of sunshine" ☀️ comes from, and its year number runs seven to eight years behind the Gregorian one: the Ethiopian year 2019 began on 11 September 2026. Clocks are counted from dawn, so 7 in the morning is 1 o'clock in Ethiopian time.

Enkutatash, New Year, falls on 11 September (12 September in the year before a Gregorian leap year), when the rains end and the yellow adey abeba daisies 🌼 cover the highlands; girls go from house to house singing and people send መልካም አዲስ ዓመት (melkam addis amet, happy new year) 🌼🇪🇹. Meskel on 27 September celebrates the finding of the True Cross with the demera, a huge bonfire lit on the eve 🔥✝️. Genna, Christmas, is on 7 January after a long fast, with church services through the night 🕯️ and the old stick-and-ball game also called genna 🏑. Timkat, Epiphany, on 19 January, is the most colourful: priests carry the tabot, a replica of the tablets of the Ark of the Covenant, to water, and crowds are blessed with sprinkled water 💧✝️. Meskel and Timkat are both on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage. On 2 March Ethiopians mark the victory at Adwa in 1896, where Emperor Menelik II's army defeated Italy 🐎🇪🇹.

Ethiopian food emoji: injera, wat and the coffee ceremony ☕

There is no injera emoji, so 🫓 does the job: the large, spongy sourdough flatbread made from teff 🌾, a tiny grain native to the Horn of Africa, which serves as plate, spoon and bread at once. On it go the stews called wat 🍲, coloured red by berbere 🌶️, a chilli spice blend, and cooked with plenty of onions 🧅 and spiced clarified butter, niter kibbeh 🧈. The festive dish is doro wat 🍗🥚, chicken stewed in berbere with whole boiled eggs; 🥩 stands for kitfo, minced beef with chilli butter, and tibs, sautéed meat. Orthodox Christians fast from animal products on Wednesdays, Fridays and in the long fasts before Easter and Christmas, which is why Ethiopian cooking has so many vegan dishes: shiro and lentil misir wat 🫘, collard greens gomen 🥬. The meal is shared from one platter on the mesob, a woven basket table 🧺, and 🍯 is tej, honey wine.

Ethiopia is the homeland of Arabica coffee. The legend tells of Kaldi, a goatherd who saw his goats 🐐 dancing after eating red berries, and the coffee ceremony, buna, is the centre of hospitality: green beans are roasted in a pan in front of the guests, ground, and boiled in a black clay pot, the jebena 🏺, then poured into small cups ☕ in three rounds, abol, tona and bereka, with incense burning, fresh grass 🌿 on the floor and a bowl of popcorn 🍿. ☕🏺🍿 in a message is an invitation to come over.

Ethiopia emoji for runners, landscapes and music

🏃🥇🇪🇹 is how fans greet Ethiopian distance runners. Abebe Bikila won the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome running barefoot 👟, the first Olympic gold for a runner from sub-Saharan Africa; Haile Gebrselassie, Kenenisa Bekele, Tirunesh Dibaba and Derartu Tulu followed him on the track and the road. ⚽ is for the national football team, the Walias, named after the walia ibex of the Simien Mountains.

⛰️ is for the highlands: the Simien Mountains 🏞️, home of the gelada 🐒, a grass-eating monkey with a red patch on its chest, and of the Ethiopian wolf 🐺, Africa's most endangered carnivore, both found nowhere else. In the Danakil Depression in the Afar region, one of the hottest places on Earth, the lava lake of Erta Ale 🌋 glows and Afar salt miners cut slabs of salt 🧂 that camel caravans 🐪 carry up to the highlands. The Blue Nile starts at Lake Tana, and Addis Ababa, seat of the African Union 🌍, is the hub of Ethiopian Airlines ✈️.

Music has its own emoji too: 🎷 for Ethio-jazz, the sound of Mulatu Astatke and the 1970s Addis bands; 🥁 for the kebero church drum; 🪉 for the lyres krar and begena; 🎻 for the one-string fiddle masenqo. 💃🕺 is eskista, the shoulder dance, often danced in 👗 a white cotton habesha kemis with a woven, coloured border and a light shawl, the netela 🧣.

How to type Amharic letters and the birr

To write in fidel, add an Amharic or Tigrinya keyboard: Windows has a built-in Amharic input method, Gboard offers Amharic on Android but not iPhone, and Keyman covers most other systems. These keyboards are phonetic: you type the consonant and then the vowel on a Latin keyboard, so l + e gives ለ and s + e + l + a + m gives ሰላም. Oromo, Somali, Afar, Sidamo and Wolaytta are written in the Latin alphabet; Oromo's Qubee spelling doubles letters for long vowels and uses the apostrophe ' for the glottal stop, so it needs no special letters at all.

The currency is the birr (ETB), whose name means silver. It has no Unicode currency sign: prices are written Br or ETB, or in Amharic ብር after the number, as in 100 ብር.