Guam Emoji & Symbols

The Guam flag emoji 🇬🇺 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, G and U (Guam's ISO code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag; it became a standard emoji with most other country and territory flags in 2015. On a system without flag support, such as Windows' own emoji font, you see the letters GU instead, but the text is the same, so it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone.

The Guam flag is dark blue with a narrow red border, and in the middle sits the territory's seal, shaped like a pointed oval: the shape of an ancient CHamoru sling stone. Inside it a coconut palm 🌴 stands on the sand, a proa, the fast outrigger sailing canoe of the Marianas, sails ⛵ on the bay at the mouth of the Hagåtña River, and the cliff of Two Lovers Point rises behind, with the word GUAM in red across the seal. The design dates from 1917, the flag was formally adopted in 1930, and the red border was added in 1948; the red is often said to recall the blood shed in the Second World War. People paste it as hearts with 💙❤️, and the palm is read as a tree that grows and survives where little else can, which is how many Guamanians describe themselves.

Guam symbols: latte stones, Two Lovers Point and the faith of the island

The best-known Guam symbol has no emoji of its own: the latte stone, a stone pillar (haligi) topped with a rounded cap (tåsa). Ancient CHamorus raised houses on rows of latte, and their outline now appears on logos, tattoos, necklaces, beer glasses and the Guam quarter. 🪨 is the closest emoji for the stone and 🛖 for the house that stood on top, so 🪨🛖 is how people write "latte". Searches for Guam cultural or tribal symbols are mostly after latte, sling stones, proas and old CHamoru designs, and those are pictures rather than characters, so this page sticks to what you can paste.

Two Lovers Point (Puntan Dos Amåntes), the cliff above Tumon Bay, takes its name from the legend of two young lovers who tied their hair together and leapt into the sea rather than be parted, so 💑 belongs to Guam too, and the island is a popular place for couples from Japan, and from elsewhere in Asia, to marry in its seaside chapels 💒. Faith is everywhere: Spanish missionaries arrived in 1668, most people on Guam are Catholic, and every village keeps a fiesta for its patron saint. ✝️🙏⛪📿 are everyday emoji, above all on 8 December, when a procession carries Santa Marian Kamalen, the island's patroness, through Hagåtña.

Island, reef and the animals of Guam

Guam is the largest and southernmost of the Mariana Islands, a tropical island 🏝️ of limestone cliffs in the north, volcanic hills in the south and white beaches 🏖️ along Tumon Bay. It runs on Chamorro Standard Time, ten hours ahead of UTC, which gives it the motto "Where America's Day Begins" 🌅: it sees each new day before any US state. 🌀 is a serious emoji here, because typhoons cross the island; Typhoon Mawar in 2023 was one of the strongest in decades. The deepest place in the ocean, the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench, lies southwest of the island, and 🏞️ stands for the War in the Pacific National Historical Park, which keeps the beaches and hills of the 1944 battle.

🦇 is the fanihi, the Mariana fruit bat, now rare and protected. 🐦🐍 tell Guam's saddest nature story: the brown tree snake, which arrived by accident around the end of the Second World War, wiped out most of the island's native forest birds, and the Guam rail, the flightless koʼkoʼ, survived only because the last ones were bred in captivity. 🦀 is the ayuyu, the coconut crab, and 🐃 the carabao, the water buffalo that once pulled the island's carts and still gives rides at fairs. On the reefs: sea turtles 🐢, reef fish 🐠🐟, spinner dolphins 🐬, shells 🐚 and coral 🪸, reached by snorkel 🤿, rod 🎣 or canoe 🛶.

Fiesta food emoji: red rice, kelaguen and BBQ

A Guam fiesta table, whether for a village saint, a christening or a Saturday party, is the place to learn the island's food, and Unicode covers more of it than you might think. 🍚 is red rice (hineksaʼ agagaʼ), coloured orange-red with achote seeds; 🍗🍖🔥 is the BBQ of chicken and ribs marinated in soy sauce, vinegar and onion; 🐖 is the whole roast pig of a big fiesta. 🍋🧅🌶️ are the three things in kelaguen, chopped chicken, shrimp or fish "cooked" in lemon juice with onion, salt and hot donneʼ peppers, often with grated coconut 🥥, and in finadeneʼ, the soy, lemon or vinegar and pepper sauce that goes on everything.

🫓 is titiyas, the island's flatbread, 🍲 kådon pika, a spicy chicken stew, 🍩🍌 buñelos agaʼ, banana doughnuts, and 🥭 the mangoes of the early summer. 🥫 is Spam: Guam is often said to eat more of it per person than anywhere else, fried with eggs and rice for breakfast or served as Spam musubi. The table also carries dishes from the island's large Filipino community 🇵🇭, such as lumpia and pancit, which is part of why Guam food tastes like nowhere else.

Liberation Day, village fiestas and the emoji people send

Liberation Day, 21 July, marks the US landings of 1944 that ended almost three years of Japanese occupation, a time of forced labour and killings that older families still remember. It is Guam's biggest public holiday, with a long parade along Marine Corps Drive in Hagåtña, a carnival with rides 🎡 that runs for weeks, family barbecues and fireworks 🎆; feeds fill with 🇬🇺🎉, 🇬🇺🇺🇸 and 🎖️ for veterans. CHamorus in California, Washington and Texas hold their own Liberation Day parties, so 🇬🇺 travels far in July.

March is Mes CHamoru, CHamoru Month, for the language and culture, with dance 💃🎶 and food 🍚🍖. The US military is a large part of island life, the Navy at Apra Harbor ⚓ and the Air Force at Andersen in the north, and many families have someone in uniform. Tourism is the other big industry: flights ✈️ from Japan and Korea land visitors at the hotels 🏨 and shops 🛍️ of Tumon, the island's resort strip.

CHamoru letters å, ñ and the glota ʼ, and the US dollar $

Guam's official languages are English and CHamoru (Chamorro), the language of the Marianas' own people; CLDR estimates put the population at around 170,000, nearly all of whom use English. CHamoru, written with Latin letters and full of words from Spanish, is taught in schools and heard in greetings even from people who do not speak it fluently: Håfa adai! means hello, Si Yuʼos maʼåseʼ thank you, and Biba Guam! long live Guam. The island's own name in CHamoru is Guåhan, and its capital is Hagåtña, once spelled Agana. The Northern Mariana Islands collection covers the other half of the archipelago, and the United States collection the country Guam belongs to.

Three characters go beyond A–Z. å is a separate vowel: in Guam's spelling it is the open "a" of "father", while plain a is closer to the a of "cat", so Håfa and Guåhan need it. ñ, from Spanish, is the "ny" sound of Hagåtña. The glota is a glottal stop and counts as a letter, as in Finoʼ CHamoru (the CHamoru language) and inafaʼmaolek, the island's value of making things good for one another. Most people type it as a plain apostrophe ', which reads fine; the letter character for it is ʼ, the modifier letter apostrophe U+02BC, which keeps a word like koʼkoʼ in one piece for spell-checkers and search. Guam's official spelling also capitalises the CH in CHamoru, because Ch is one letter of the alphabet, as are Ng and Ñ.

To type them: on a Mac, Option + A gives å and Option + Shift + A Å, and Option + N then N gives ñ. On Windows hold Alt and type 0229 for å, 0197 for Å, 0241 for ñ and 0209 for Ñ on the number pad; on the US-International layout, AltGr + W gives å and ~ then N gives ñ. On a phone, long-press a or n. For ʼ, copy it from the grid above, or in Word type 02BC and press Alt + X. In HTML: å, Å, ñ, Ñ and ʼ. Guam's money is the US dollar, $ and ¢, with 💵 and 🪙 as the emoji.