Mongolia Emoji & Symbols

The Mongolia flag emoji 🇲🇳 has three vertical stripes, red, blue and red, with the golden Soyombo on the red stripe at the hoist. The blue is the eternal blue sky 💙, Tengri, which Mongols have honoured as the highest power since ancient times; the red is usually explained as progress and prosperity. The present flag dates from 1992, when the communist star above the Soyombo was removed. Like every country flag emoji it is two regional indicator letters, 🇲 and 🇳, for the code MN: phones and Macs usually display them as a flag, while many Windows apps show the two letters; display depends on the app and font.

The Soyombo is a sign made of simple shapes stacked one above another, and each has a traditional reading. On top a fire 🔥 with three tongues, for growth and for past, present and future; below it a sun ☀️ and a crescent moon 🌙, read as symbols of the origin of the Mongol people and a wish that the nation lives on for ever; then two triangles pointing down like arrowheads, against enemies, and two flat bars, for honesty and justice. In the middle sits a yin-yang ☯️, read in Mongolia as two fish, which never close their eyes and so stand for watchfulness, and on both sides two upright bars, the walls of a fortress: the unity of the people, stronger than stone. The sign takes its name from the Soyombo script that the Buddhist leader Zanabazar created in 1686, where it marks the beginning of a text.

Unicode added the Soyombo script in 2017, and with it the sign itself as 𑪞 (U+11A9E, Soyombo head mark with moon and sun and triple flame). It is the character to copy when you search for the Soyombo symbol, but it only shows where a Soyombo font such as Noto Sans Soyombo is installed; elsewhere it is a box, so many people paste 🇲🇳 or 🔥☀️🌙 instead. The state emblem repeats the Soyombo inside a blue circle with the golden wind horse 🐎, the khiimori that carries a person's luck, under a wish-granting jewel 💎, above a wheel of dharma ☸️ and on a lotus 🪷.

Mongolian symbols to copy and paste: the tugrik ₮ and two scripts

The tugrik sign ₮ (U+20AE) writes the Mongolian tögrög, MNT. In Mongolia it usually follows the amount, as in 5,000₮, and the price tags of shops and cafés are full of it; the word is also shortened to төг. It looks like a T with two strokes across the stem. In HTML it is ₮; in Word type 20AE and press Alt+X. Chinggis Khaan's portrait is on the larger banknotes.

Mongolia writes its language in Cyrillic, adopted in the 1940s under Soviet influence. The alphabet has 35 letters; among them Ө ө and Ү ү write the vowels romanised ö and ü. They are real letters, not decorations: ус is water and үс is hair. The pair takes part in vowel harmony, which keeps the vowels of a Mongolian word either all from the set а, о, у or all from э, ө, ү (и goes with both), so they appear in very many Mongolian words, as in өдөр (day) and Өглөөний мэнд (good morning). Ө is not the Greek Θ and Ү is neither the Latin Y nor the Cyrillic У; copy them from the grid if your keyboard lacks them, or add the Mongolian (Cyrillic) keyboard on Windows, Mac, Android or iPhone. In HTML they are Ө ө for Ө ө and Ү ү for Ү ү.

The older Mongolian script, Mongol bichig, came from the Old Uyghur alphabet and has been used since the time of Chinggis Khaan. It is written in vertical columns from top to bottom, and the columns follow each other from left to right; letters join and change shape at the start, middle and end of a word, so ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ, Mongol, is a single flowing line. Unicode has encoded it since 1999 (the Mongolian block at U+1800, with its own digits ᠐ ᠑ ᠒ and punctuation ᠂ ᠃), but most apps lay it out horizontally, so a pasted word may appear on its side. The script was never forgotten: it is taught in Mongolian schools, it is on the banknotes, on signs and in logos, and Mongolia has used it alongside Cyrillic in official correspondence since 2025. In Inner Mongolia, in China, it is the everyday script. The grid shows the core letters and marks; the full alphabet is in the Mongolian collection.

Naadam emoji: wrestling 🤼, archery 🏹 and horse racing 🏇

Naadam, the summer festival that opens on 11 July, is Mongolia's biggest holiday, and its emoji are the three games of men: wrestling 🤼, archery 🏹 and horse racing 🏇. Wrestlers wear the open-fronted zodog jacket, briefs and boots, and before and after a bout they perform the eagle dance 🦅 with spread arms. There are no weight classes and no time limit; whoever touches the ground with knee, elbow or back loses. The winners earn titles such as Falcon, Elephant, Lion and Titan.

The horse races are run over long cross-country courses on the open steppe, and the riders are children, light enough to let the horses run; the winning horses are praised in song, and the last horse in the daaga (two-year-old) race gets a song of encouragement. Women compete in archery beside the men, and when an arrow hits the small leather targets the judges raise their arms and sing a drawn-out uukhai. 🦴 belongs here too: shagai, sheep anklebones, are flicked at targets in a contest that has joined the festival. Naadam is on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage, and 🎉🇲🇳 with 🤼🏹🏇 is a fitting greeting in July.

Mongolian wrestlers also rule Japanese sumo. Asashōryū, Hakuhō, Harumafuji, Kakuryū and Terunofuji all reached yokozuna, the top rank, and Hakuhō won a record 45 top-division championships. Mongolia's first Olympic gold came in judo 🥋 in 2008, and boxing 🥊 has brought it medals too.

Mongolian ger emoji ⛺, the five animals and Mongolian food 🥟

There is no ger (yurt) emoji, so ⛺ or 🛖 stands for the round felt tent on a wooden lattice that herding families take down and move with the seasons; it is warm in winter, and its door traditionally faces south. Ger districts circle Ulaanbaatar too. Herders count their wealth in the five snouts: horses 🐴, camels 🐫, cattle 🐄 (yaks 🐂 among them), sheep 🐑 and goats 🐐. The Mongolian camel is the Bactrian camel with two humps, so 🐫 is the right emoji and 🐪 the wrong one. The goats make Mongolia one of the world's great sources of cashmere 🧶.

The food is meat and milk. 🥟 covers three favourites: buuz, steamed dumplings made by the hundred for the new year, khuushuur, flat fried meat pastries eaten at Naadam, and bansh, small dumplings boiled in soup or milk tea. 🍖 is khorkhog and boodog, meat cooked with hot stones, the second inside the animal's own skin; 🍜 is tsuivan, fried noodles with meat. To drink there is suutei tsai 🍵🥛, milk tea with salt, and in summer airag, fermented mare's milk (🐎🥛). 🧀 stands for aaruul, dried curd, 🧈 for öröm, the thick cream, and 🍪 for boortsog, the fried biscuits served with tea.

Tsagaan Sar, faith and music in emoji

Tsagaan Sar, the White Month, is the lunar new year, which falls between late January and early March. Families visit their elders in a deel 🧥 and boots 👢; the younger person holds out both arms under the elder's arms in the zolgokh greeting, often with a blue silk scarf, the khadag (🧣💙). The table carries a tower of ul boov biscuits 🍪, a sheep's back 🐑 and plates of buuz 🥟. The greeting is Сар шинэдээ сайхан шинэлээрэй!, may you have a good new month.

Most religious Mongolians are Tibetan Buddhists: 🙏, the prayer beads 📿 and the butter lamp 🪔 are their emoji, and 🛕 stands for monasteries such as Gandan in Ulaanbaatar and Erdene Zuu at the old capital Karakorum. Older beliefs live alongside: shamans with their drum 🥁, and the ovoo 🪨, a cairn on a pass or hilltop hung with blue scarves, which travellers walk around three times clockwise, adding a stone.

The national instrument is the morin khuur 🎻, the horsehead fiddle, with two strings and a carved horse's head on the neck. Khöömii, throat singing 🎶, lets one singer sound a low drone and a whistling melody at once. Both are on UNESCO's intangible heritage lists, and the band The HU took them around the world as folk metal.

Mongolia emoji for Chinggis Khaan, the Gobi and wildlife

Chinggis Khaan (Genghis Khan) united the Mongol tribes and was proclaimed khan in 1206; his empire became the largest contiguous land empire in history. 👑🏹🐎 is how people write him, ⚔️🛡️ for the empire, and 📜 for the Secret History of the Mongols, the oldest work of Mongolian literature, which begins with a blue-grey wolf 🐺 and a fallow doe 🦌 as the ancestors of his line. There is no Mongol Empire flag emoji: his standard was the tug, a pole with horse-tail hair, white in peace and black in war.

The Gobi 🏜️ in the south is cold desert and gravel plain with singing dunes, and one of the best-known dinosaur grounds on Earth 🦖🦕: the Flaming Cliffs gave the world its first recognised dinosaur eggs 🥚, and Velociraptor was named after a skull found there. In the far west the Altai 🏔️ are home to Kazakh eagle hunters, who hunt with golden eagles 🦅 and show them at an eagle festival every autumn. In the north, Lake Khövsgöl 🏞️ borders the taiga where Dukha families herd reindeer 🦌.

Snow leopards 🐆 live in the mountains, the rare Gobi bear 🐻 in the desert, the wild takhi horse has returned to the steppe, and the taimen 🐟, the largest of all salmon and trout, swims in the rivers. Winters are long and hard ❄️🥶: Ulaanbaatar 🏙️ is often called the coldest capital in the world, and the Trans-Mongolian Railway 🚂 runs through it between Russia and China. Mining ⛏️ of copper, gold and coal drives the economy. On clear nights the sky over the steppe is very dark, far from city lights 🌌.