Montserrat Emoji & Symbols

The Montserrat flag emoji 🇲🇸 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, M and S (Montserrat's ISO country code), which phones and apps draw together as the flag. Most country flags, Montserrat's among them, arrived as emoji in 2015. On a system without flag support (Windows' own emoji font, for example) you see the letters MS instead; the text underneath is the same, so it still shows as a flag on the reader's phone. Because MS is also the postal code of Mississippi, people searching for a "ms flag emoji" are sometimes surprised to find 🇲🇸: US states have no regional-indicator flags, so 🇲🇸 is always Montserrat.

The flag is a British Blue Ensign: dark blue with the Union Jack in the corner, as befits a British Overseas Territory 🇬🇧, and the island's coat of arms in the fly. The arms, which go back to 1909, show Erin, the woman who personifies Ireland, in a green dress, holding a golden harp 🪉 and with her other arm around a dark cross ✝️. They are a tribute to the Irish who settled the island in the 17th century. There is no emoji of the arms, so people paste 🇲🇸☘️, 🇲🇸🪉 or Ireland's colours as hearts 💚🤍🧡.

Montserrat symbols: the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean ☘️

Montserrat is called the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean for two reasons: its steep green hills, and its Irish past. From 1632 Irish Catholics, many of them indentured servants, were sent here from St Kitts 🇰🇳 and later from Virginia; enslaved Africans brought to work the sugar plantations soon outnumbered them, and most Montserratians today are of African descent. The Irish left surnames, place names and the shamrock ☘️, which appears on the island's official emblems and is stamped into visitors' passports at immigration. Pair it with 🇮🇪 for the island's Irish links and with 💚 for everything green.

St Patrick's Day, 17 March, is a public holiday on Montserrat, one of very few places outside Ireland where it is. It marks two things at once: Ireland's patron saint, and the uprising that enslaved people planned for 17 March 1768, while the planters were at their St Patrick's celebrations. The plot was betrayed and its leaders executed; the holiday now honours them, so ✊⛓️‍💥 sits beside ☘️💚 in the posts. The festival around it lasts several days, with a freedom run, a heritage feast and the masquerade dancers 🎭: masked performers in tall decorated headdresses, dancing to the fife 🪈 and the kettle and boom drums 🥁.

Montserrat's other big celebration is Festival, its Christmas-season carnival 🎄, with calypso and queen shows (👑) and parades, ending in Jump-Up Day on New Year's Day 🎆🎉. The national bird is the Montserrat oriole, a black-and-yellow songbird found nowhere else; there is no oriole emoji, so 🐦 stands in for it.

The volcano 🌋: Soufrière Hills and the buried capital

🌋 is the emoji most tied to Montserrat after the flag. The Soufrière Hills volcano, quiet for centuries, began erupting on 18 July 1995 and has stayed active since. Ash 🌫️ and pyroclastic flows buried the capital, Plymouth, which was abandoned; on 25 June 1997 a flow killed 19 people, and the old airport was lost the same year. Roughly two thirds of the people left the island, many for Britain. The south is still an exclusion zone ⛔⚠️, and life moved north to Brades, Salem and Little Bay. Plymouth remains the official capital, a ghost town 🏚️ under grey ash.

The Montserrat Volcano Observatory watches the dome around the clock, and visitors look down on Plymouth from Jack Boy Hill and Garibaldi Hill or fly over it by helicopter 🚁. 🌋🔥🌫️ is what people post when the volcano stirs; 🌀 joins it for hurricane season, since Hurricane Hugo wrecked much of the island in September 1989, six years before the eruption began.

Music emoji: AIR Studios and "Hot Hot Hot" 🔥

For ten years Montserrat was one of the most famous places in pop music. Beatles producer George Martin opened AIR Studios Montserrat 🎙️🎛️ in 1979, and records made there include the Police's Ghost in the Machine and Synchronicity, Paul McCartney's Tug of War, Elton John's Too Low for Zero, Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms and the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels 💿🎸. Hurricane Hugo closed the studio in 1989. When the volcano struck, many of the same artists played the Music for Montserrat concert at the Royal Albert Hall in September 1997 to raise money for the island.

Montserrat's own star was the soca singer Arrow (Alphonsus Cassell), whose 1982 song "Hot Hot Hot" became an international hit in 1983: 🔥🔥🔥🌶️🎶 is the island's party combo, heard every Festival.

Montserrat food, nature and the national dish

The national dish is goat water: a thick, spiced goat stew served with crusty bread rolls, 🐐🍲🍞. Ducana, a dumpling of grated sweet potato and coconut boiled in a leaf, comes with saltfish: 🍠🥥🐟. Mangoes 🥭 grow everywhere, and rum punch is 🍹. The mountain chicken is a giant frog 🐸 found only on Montserrat and Dominica; it was traditionally eaten, but the volcano and then a fungal disease that arrived in 2009 left it critically endangered, and it is now protected, so 🐸💚 is a conservation message, not a menu.

The island is about 16 km (10 miles) long. The forested Centre Hills 🌳🥾 are crossed by hiking trails where the oriole lives, and the heliconia (lobster claw), the national flower, grows in the undergrowth; 🌺 is the nearest emoji. Most beaches are black or grey volcanic sand; Rendezvous Bay in the north is the one white-sand beach 🏖️. Turtles 🐢 and reef fish 🐠 make for good diving 🤿. Visitors fly by small plane 🛩️ from Antigua 🇦🇬, landing at the little airport at Gerald's.

Montserrat currency symbol: EC$ and how to type it

Montserrat's currency is the Eastern Caribbean dollar (code XCD), shared with Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines. It has no sign of its own: prices are written EC$ or simply $, divided into 100 cents ¢. It has been pegged at EC$2.70 to the US dollar since 1976, and US dollars 💵 are widely accepted.

To type $ on a US keyboard layout, press Shift + 4. For ¢, hold Alt and type 0162 on the Windows number pad, press Option + 4 on a Mac, or write ¢ in HTML; on a phone, long-press $ on the symbols keyboard.

Montserrat's official language is English (CLDR lists 3,500 English speakers), with Montserrat Creole in everyday speech, so there are no special letters beyond A–Z; see our English collection for its punctuation and quotation marks. For more Irish emoji see our Ireland collection, and for the neighbours our Antigua and Barbuda and Anguilla collections.