Haiti Emoji & Symbols

The Haitian flag emoji is not a single picture character. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇭 and 🇹, the country code HT, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no country flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC the same emoji shows as the letters HT. Copy it anyway: anyone reading on a phone sees the flag. On Discord you can also type :flag_ht:.

The flag goes back to 18 May 1803, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines, at the congress of Arcahaie, tore the white band out of the French tricolour and kept the blue and the red, and Catherine Flon sewed the two together. That day is still Flag Day, Jou Drapo, Haiti's proudest holiday after Independence Day, and the day people fill their stories and bios with 🇭🇹💙❤️. In emoji the colours also work as squares, 🟦🟥.

The state flag carries the coat of arms on a white square: a royal palm 🌴 topped by a red and blue liberty cap, surrounded by cannons, flags and a drum 🥁, over the motto L'union fait la force, unity is strength. The emoji at small sizes shows the arms only as a little white patch. Next door, the Dominican Republic 🇩🇴 shares the island of Hispaniola, and its flag is commonly said to have kept Haiti's blue and red and added a white cross.

Haiti symbols and meanings: 🐚 ⛓️‍💥 🌴 🌺

Haiti became independent on 1 January 1804, the first nation founded by formerly enslaved people who had won their freedom in a revolution, led by Toussaint Louverture and then Dessalines. ⛓️‍💥, the broken chain, says that in one character, and ✊ is often sent with it. The last great battle of the war, Vertières, was fought on 18 November 1803 and is remembered every year on that date.

🐚 is the lambi, the conch shell. Blown like a horn, it has long been a signal in the countryside, a call to gather that stands for the call to revolt in the story of the revolution, and the statue of the Unknown Maroon, Nèg Mawon, by Albert Mangonès, on the Champ de Mars in Port-au-Prince shows a man with a broken chain at his ankle blowing a conch. Lambi is also a favourite dish, conch stewed in a spicy sauce.

The royal palm 🌴, palmis, stands in the middle of the coat of arms; the hibiscus 🌺, choublak, is the unofficial national flower; and 🐦 stands for the national bird, the Hispaniolan trogon, kanson wouj. People searching for "Haitian symbols" often mean the vèvè of Vodou, the drawings in cornmeal that call each spirit; they are not in Unicode, so on this page you will find the emoji people use instead, in the faith section below.

Haitian food emoji: 🍚🫘 🐖 🍌 🎃 🌶️

A Haitian plate in emoji is 🍚🫘 for diri ak pwa, rice and beans, 🐖 for griyo, pork marinated in sour orange and fried, 🍌 for bannann peze, green plantains fried, flattened and fried again, and 🌶️🥬🥕 for pikliz, the fiery slaw of cabbage, carrots and Scotch bonnet peppers in vinegar that goes with everything. 🍄 stands for diri djon djon, rice cooked black with dried mushrooms from the north, 🐐 for goat, kabrit, and 🐟🦞🦀 for fish and seafood along the coast.

On 1 January Haitian families traditionally eat soup joumou, a squash soup with beef, pasta and vegetables. Under French rule the enslaved grew the squash but the soup was kept for their masters, so eating it on Independence Day celebrates freedom; UNESCO added it to its Intangible Cultural Heritage lists in 2021. There is no squash emoji, so people send 🍲 or 🥣, and many use 🎃 for the joumou itself.

☕ is Haitian coffee, grown in the mountains; in the 1780s the colony of Saint-Domingue was one of the world's biggest coffee producers. 🥃 is rum, above all Rhum Barbancourt, made since 1862, 🍺 the local Prestige beer, and 🥥 goes into kremas, a sweet creamy coconut and rum drink poured at the holidays. 🫓 is kasav, cassava bread, 🥜 the spicy peanut butter manba, and 🍠 pen patat, sweet potato pudding; 🥭🥑 are the mangoes and avocados sold in every market.

Kompa, kanaval, Vodou and holidays in emoji: 🎷 🎭 💀 🎆

Haiti's dance music is kompa, smooth and steady, created in 1955 by the bandleader Nemours Jean-Baptiste: 🎷🎸🎤🥁, and 💃🕺 for the couples dancing to it. Before Lent comes Kanaval 🎭🎉, with the papier-mâché masks of Jacmel, and after it, through Lent to Easter, rara bands march the roads with drums 🪘, rattles 🪇 and vaksin, bamboo trumpets 🎺.

Most Haitians are Catholic or Protestant ⛪✝️🙏📿, and many also serve the spirits of Vodou, which grew from African religions brought by the enslaved and is part of daily life and art. On 1 and 2 November, at Fèt Gede, the spirits of the dead are honoured in the cemeteries: 💀🎩🕯️ for Baron Samedi and the Gede in their top hats. 🐍 is Danbala, the serpent spirit, and 💧 the waterfall of Saut-d'Eau, where pilgrims bathe each July in honour of the Virgin and Èzili.

🎆 greets 1 January, Independence Day, followed on 2 January by Ancestors' Day. 🎄 is Christmas, Nwèl, when people say Jwaye Nwèl, and the year ends with Bòn ane, happy New Year.

Haiti emoji for places and sport: 🏰 ⛰️ 🛻 ⚽

The name Haiti comes from the Taíno Ayiti, usually explained as "land of high mountains", and a Creole proverb says Dèyè mòn gen mòn, beyond the mountains there are more mountains ⛰️. On one of them above Milot stands the Citadelle Laferrière 🏰, the vast fortress built after independence by Henri Christophe, later King Henri I 👑, next to his palace of Sans-Souci; together they have been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1982. The coast gives 🏖️🏝️🌊 for Labadee, Île-à-Vache and the beaches near Jacmel.

🛻 and 🚌 are the tap-tap, pickup trucks and buses painted with saints, singers, footballers and slogans, which stop when a passenger taps on the side; 🏍️ is the moto-taxi. Haitian painting 🎨🖼️ became famous from 1944, when the Centre d'Art opened in Port-au-Prince, and in Croix-des-Bouquets artists cut and hammer old oil drums 🛢️ into metal sculptures. ✨ fits the sequined Vodou flags, drapo Vodou, and children fly kites, kap, 🪁.

⚽ is the national passion. At the 1974 World Cup Emmanuel Sanon scored against Italy and ended Dino Zoff's record run of more than 1,100 minutes without conceding; the women's team reached its first World Cup in 2023, and the men qualified for the 2026 World Cup, their first since 1974. 🏅 is for Silvio Cator, silver medallist in the long jump at the 1928 Olympics.

Haitian symbols for writing: the gourde sign G, è, ò and French accents

The Haitian currency is the gourde, code HTG, written G or Gde after the amount, and divided into 100 centimes; there is no special Unicode sign for it. In shops and markets people often count in Haitian dollars instead, dola, written $ or $HT: a Haitian dollar is 5 gourdes, a habit that goes back to the decades when the gourde was fixed at five to the US dollar. US dollars 💵 also circulate widely.

Haitian Creole, Kreyòl ayisyen, spoken by about 9.5 million people in Haiti by CLDR's estimate and in practice by nearly every Haitian, has been an official language alongside French since the 1987 constitution. Its spelling, standardised in 1979, is close to how words sound and needs only two accented letters: è, an open e as in mèsi, thank you, and ò, an open o as in Kreyòl; bo is a kiss but bò is a side. Sounds like ch, ou, an, en and on are written with two plain letters. For the whole alphabet see our Haitian Creole collection.

French, spoken by about 4.9 million people in Haiti (CLDR estimate), uses é è ê à â ç ô î ï ë ù û ü œ and the quotation marks « »; see our French collection. On Windows hold Alt and type on the number pad 138 for è, 149 ò, 130 é, 133 à, 135 ç, 136 ê, 174 « and 175 », or 0200 for È and 0210 for Ò. On a Mac press Option + ` then E or O for è ò, Option + E then E for é, Option + C for ç and Option + \ for «. On a phone, long-press E or O. In HTML, è and ò.