Grenada Emoji & Symbols

The Grenada flag emoji 🇬🇩 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, G and D (Grenada's ISO country code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag. Most country flags, Grenada's among them, arrived as emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support (Windows' own emoji font, for example) you see the letters GD instead; the text underneath is the same, so it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone.

The flag was first raised on Independence Day, 7 February 1974. A red border carries six gold stars, three above and three below, and a seventh star sits on a red disc in the middle: together they stand for the seven parishes: the six on Grenada plus the combined Carriacou and Petite Martinique district, with the central star for St George's. The field inside is cut into gold and green triangles, and on the green triangle by the hoist is a small nutmeg, the island's famous spice. Red is read as courage and vitality, gold as wisdom and the warmth of the sun, green as the land and its farms.

There is no nutmeg emoji, so people paste 🌰, the nearest-looking nut, or simply let 🇬🇩 carry it. The colours go in as hearts ❤️💛💚, and ⭐ stands in for the stars. You will see 🇬🇩❤️💛💚 in bios, on Independence posts and under every Grenadian gold medal.

Grenada symbols: the Spice Isle, the Grenada dove and the coat of arms

Grenada calls itself the Spice Isle, and the spice that earns the name is nutmeg 🌰: the island was long one of the world's biggest growers, and the lacy red mace that wraps each seed is sold as a spice of its own. Around it grow cinnamon, cloves, bay leaf 🌿, ginger 🫚, turmeric (called saffron locally) and cocoa 🍫, which estates and small makers turn into bean-to-bar chocolate on the island. Spice baskets of nutmeg, cinnamon sticks, cloves and cocoa balls are the classic thing to bring home.

🕊️ is the nearest emoji to the national bird, the Grenada dove, a shy ground dove found nowhere else in the world and critically endangered. The national flower is the bougainvillea, which has no emoji. On the coat of arms the shield is held by an armadillo and a Grenada dove, and the motto reads Ever Conscious of God We Aspire, Build and Advance as One People; the anthem is "Hail Grenada".

Grenadian food emoji: oil down, Fish Friday and cocoa tea

There is no emoji for the national dish, oil down, so Grenadians build it: 🥘🥥 is the big pot of breadfruit, salted meat, chicken 🍗, dumplings 🥟 and callaloo leaves 🥬, slow-cooked in coconut milk coloured with turmeric until the milk is all absorbed and only a little coconut oil is left at the bottom, which gives it the name. It is a dish for a crowd: a Sunday, a beach lime or a village fund-raiser. 🍠 is the provisions that go with almost everything (yam, dasheen, sweet potato), and a drop of 🌶️ means the hot pepper sauce on the table.

🐟 is for Fish Friday in Gouyave, the fishing town on the west coast, where every Friday evening the main street fills with stalls of grilled, fried and curried fish. 🐚 is lambi, the Caribbean name for conch, stewed or curried; 🦞 is lobster in season. 🍛🫓 is curry and roti, 🍞 is bake and saltfish for breakfast, and 🍦 is nutmeg ice cream. Breakfast can also mean cocoa tea ☕🍫, a hot drink made from grated local cocoa with spice.

To drink: 🥃 rum, from distilleries such as River Antoine, which still crushes its cane with a water wheel, and 🍹 rum punch with grated nutmeg on top. In Carriacou the white overproof is Jack Iron. At Christmas 🌺 is sorrel, the deep red drink brewed from the hibiscus sepals of the sorrel plant, and 🍰 is black cake, the dark fruit cake soaked in rum.

Spicemas, Independence Day and the holiday emoji people send

Spicemas, Grenada's carnival, comes in August. The season brings calypso and soca monarch shows 🎤, steel band Panorama 🥁 and the crowning of the carnival king and queen 👑, and it peaks with J'ouvert before dawn and the parade of mas bands in feathered, jewelled costumes 🎭🪶💃🕺🎶. The best-known Grenadian mas is Jab Jab (from the French Creole for "devil devil"): men and women cover themselves in black oil or molasses 🖤, wear horns 😈 and drag chains ⛓️ through the streets at J'ouvert. Many Grenadians read it as a defiant memory of slavery and its end, and Emancipation Day on 1 August, marked with ⛓️‍💥, falls in the same season.

Independence Day on 7 February is the day of 🇬🇩🎉🎆: Grenada became independent of Britain in 1974, and the country dresses in red, gold and green for parades and church services. Carriacou has its own calendar: the Carriacou Regatta ⛵, raced in wooden sloops still built by hand on the beach at Windward, the Big Drum dance 🪘 that keeps alive the African nations of its people's ancestors, and string-band Parang at Christmas. On Fisherman's Birthday, 29 June, Gouyave blesses its boats 🎣⛪ before a day of feasting, and Christmas brings 🎄 with sorrel and black cake.

Beaches, volcanoes, sport and island life

Grand Anse beach, about three kilometres of pale sand just south of St George's, is the 🏝️🏖️☀️🌊🌅 of holiday photos. In Molinere Bay the Underwater Sculpture Park, begun in 2006 by Jason deCaires Taylor and the first of its kind in the world, is visited with a mask 🤿 among the fish 🐠 and coral 🪸, and leatherback turtles 🐢 come ashore to nest on beaches such as Levera. Yachts ⛵🛥️ crowd the bays in the sailing season, and cruise ships 🛳️ tie up in St George's.

Grenada is volcanic. The rainforest of Grand Etang 🏞️🌳 surrounds a lake in an old crater, where Mona monkeys 🐒, brought from West Africa centuries ago, live in the trees, and just north of the island lies Kick 'em Jenny 🌋, an active volcano under the sea. Hurricanes 🌀 are part of the island's memory: Ivan in 2004 damaged most of Grenada's buildings and flattened its nutmeg trees, and Beryl struck Carriacou and Petite Martinique in July 2024.

St George's wraps around the horseshoe harbour of the Carenage ⚓, its hillsides stacked with houses under red roofs 🏘️ and church towers ⛪, and brightly painted minibuses 🚐 with names on the windscreen carry people around the island. In sport, Grenada plays cricket 🏏 for the West Indies, and it punches far above its size in athletics 🏃🥇: Kirani James won the 400 metres at the London 2012 Olympics, Grenada's first Olympic medal, and Anderson Peters became world javelin champion in 2019 and 2022. Football ⚽ fans follow the national team, the Spice Boyz.

Grenada currency symbol EC$ and writing Grenadian English

Grenada uses the Eastern Caribbean dollar (code XCD), shared with its neighbours in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union 🇦🇮🇦🇬🇩🇲🇲🇸🇰🇳🇱🇨🇻🇨 and pegged at 2.70 to the US dollar since 1976. It is written with the ordinary dollar sign $, as EC$ when it could be confused with US dollars (EC$27 is about US$10), and split into 100 cents ¢. Type $ with Shift + 4; the cent sign ¢ is Alt + 0162 on Windows, Option + 4 on a Mac and ¢ in HTML.

English is the official language, written with British spelling, and it needs no letters beyond plain A–Z, so this page has no special-letter grid; the English collection covers the punctuation and typography of English itself. Day to day most people speak Grenadian Creole English, and an older French-based Creole, Patois, still lives on among some elders, a trace of the century and more of French rule before Britain took the island (🇫🇷 then 🇬🇧). It shows in the map: Gouyave, Sauteurs, Grand Anse, Grand Etang. CLDR estimates put the population at about 115,000, on three islands with about 344 square kilometres of land between them.