Nepal Emoji & Symbols

The Nepal flag emoji 🇳🇵 shows the only national flag in the world that is not a rectangle: two stacked crimson pennants edged in blue, a white moon in the upper one and a white sun in the lower. Crimson is the colour of the rhododendron, the national flower, and Nepal's national colour; blue stands for peace. The moon and sun are commonly read as the wish that Nepal may last as long as they do, and the two peaks as the Himalaya or as the country's two great faiths, Hinduism and Buddhism. In its present form the flag dates from 16 December 1962. That is why 🌙☀️ works as a small Nepal sign of its own.

Like every country flag emoji, 🇳🇵 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇳 and 🇵, for the country code NP. Phones, Macs and most browsers join them into the flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters NP, while a phone on the other end still sees the flag.

The national animal is the cow 🐄, sacred in Hinduism, and Nepal's law protects it. The national flower, the lali gurans or red rhododendron, turns the hills crimson in spring; it has no emoji, and 🌺 is what people send. The national bird, the danphe or Himalayan monal, a pheasant with shining green, blue and copper feathers, has none either. The khukuri, the curved knife of the hills, carried by the Gurkha soldiers who have served in the British army since 1815, is written 🗡️. Since 2017 volleyball 🏐 has been the national sport. The national emblem shows Mount Everest, green hills and the yellow plains of the Terai, the map of Nepal, a man's and a woman's hands joined, and a garland of rhododendrons.

Nepal emoji for Everest 🏔️, treks, wildlife and cricket

🏔️ is the Himalaya along Nepal's northern border, and above all Mount Everest, called Sagarmatha in Nepali, 8,848.86 metres high by the joint Nepali and Chinese survey of 2020. Eight of the world's fourteen peaks above 8,000 metres stand in Nepal or on its borders, among them Kangchenjunga, Lhotse, Makalu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu and Annapurna. 🥾⛺ are the treks to Everest Base Camp and around Annapurna, 🧗 the climbers, 🛩️ the small planes that land at Lukla on the way to Everest, and 🚁 the helicopters that fly supplies and rescues. In Pokhara, 🪂 is paragliding from Sarangkot over Phewa Lake, 🛶 the painted boats on the lake, and 🚣 the rafting rivers such as the Trishuli. 🚠 is the cable car to Chandragiri above Kathmandu or to the Manakamana temple.

In the Terai lowlands, Chitwan and Bardiya national parks are home to the one-horned rhinoceros 🦏, the Bengal tiger 🐅 and elephants 🐘; 🐆 is the leopard emoji; snow leopards of the high mountains have no dedicated emoji. Yaks have no emoji of their own; 🐃 is the usual stand-in. The red panda, which lives in Nepal's eastern forests, has no emoji either.

🏏 is the sport that fills the stands: Nepal's cricket team first played the T20 World Cup in 2014, and a home match at the Kirtipur ground is a sea of 🇳🇵. ⚽ is the other big game, and 🏐 the national sport.

Dashain and Tihar emoji: 🔴 🌱 🪁 🪔 🐕 🌼

Dashain, in September or October, is Nepal's biggest festival, fifteen days for the goddess Durga's victory over the demon Mahishasura. On Vijaya Dashami, elders put a red tika of rice, yogurt and vermilion on the foreheads of the younger family and tuck jamara, the pale barley shoots grown in the dark since the first day, behind their ears: 🔴🌱. The sky fills with kites 🪁, villages build tall bamboo swings, fairs set up hand-turned Ferris wheels 🎡, and families share goat meat 🐐 at the feasts. The greeting is विजया दशमीको शुभकामना, best wishes for Vijaya Dashami.

Tihar, a few weeks later, is the five-day festival of lights. The five days honour crows 🐦‍⬛ on Kag Tihar; dogs 🐕 on Kukur Tihar, when people honour them with marigold garlands 🌼 and a red tika; cows 🐄 on Gai Tihar and Laxmi Puja, when houses are lit with oil lamps 🪔 for the goddess of wealth; oxen on the fourth day; and finally brothers on Bhai Tika, when sisters give them a seven-coloured tika and a garland. Groups of young people go from house to house singing deusi and bhailo songs to the madal 🪘, and fireworks 🎆 go up at night. For the Newar community the fourth day is Mha Puja and the start of the Nepal Sambat new year.

Women dress in red saris 🥻 and dance 💃 for Teej in late summer, many after a day of fasting for Shiva and Parvati. Holi, here also called Fagu Purnima, is colours 🎨 and water balloons. In the Madhesh plains Chhath brings families to rivers and ponds to make offerings to the setting and the rising sun 🌅. 🎉 goes with Nepali New Year in mid-April, the start of Baisakh, and with the Losar new years of the Tamang, Gurung and Sherpa peoples, all public holidays.

Temples and stupas: 🕉️ 🛕 🔱 ☸️ 🪷

Most Nepalis are Hindu, and 🕉️ (or the Devanagari ॐ), 🛕 and 🙏 are the everyday emoji of faith. Pashupatinath, the temple of Shiva on the Bagmati river in Kathmandu, is the holiest Hindu site in the country; 🔱 is Shiva's trident, seen everywhere at Maha Shivaratri, when sadhus gather there from Nepal and India.

Nepal is also the land where the Buddha was born, at Lumbini in the Terai, a UNESCO World Heritage Site; ☸️ 🪷 🧘 📿 are the emoji for it and for Buddha Jayanti, his birthday on the full moon of Baisakh. There is no stupa emoji. The great stupas of Kathmandu, Boudhanath and Swayambhunath, are known for the pair of eyes painted on all four sides of the tower, so 👁️👁️ is the closest way to write them; Swayambhunath is also called the Monkey Temple 🐒 for the monkeys that live on its hill. Prayer flags in blue, white, red, green and yellow fly on every pass and bridge; 🟦⬜🟥🟩🟨 in their colours is the usual stand-in.

Nepali food emoji: momo 🥟, dal bhat 🍛 and chiya ☕

🥟 means momo in Nepal, the steamed dumpling sold on every street, filled with buffalo (buff), chicken or vegetables, eaten with a tomato and sesame achar, or swimming in soup as jhol momo. 🥟🥟🥟 is how a momo craving is written.

Dal bhat, lentil soup and rice with tarkari (vegetable curry) and achar (pickle), is eaten twice a day in most homes, and 🍛🍚🌶️ is how people write it; trekkers know the saying "dal bhat power, 24 hour", because the plate is refilled until you stop it. 🍜 is thukpa, the noodle soup of the mountains, 🍩 the nearest emoji for sel roti, the ring-shaped fried rice bread made for Tihar and Dashain, and 🧀 the chhurpi, a cheese of yak or cow milk so hard that people chew a piece for hours.

☕ is chiya, milky sweet tea, often spiced, drunk many times a day, and 🍵 the tea gardens of Ilam in the eastern hills.

Nepali letters, numbers and the Nepal currency symbol ₨

Nepali, the official language of Nepal, is the mother tongue of a little under half of the country's roughly 31 million people (an estimate); it is written in Devanagari, the script it shares with Hindi and Marathi. The grid has its vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ ए ऐ ओ औ, the 33 consonants from क to ह and the signs ँ ं ः ्. School charts end the alphabet with क्ष त्र ज्ञ, which are not separate letters but conjuncts: type क, the halanta ्, then ष. In everyday Nepali speech श ष and स all sound like s, and व is often said as b, so spelling has to be learned. Nepal also writes its own numbers: dates, prices and official papers use the digits ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ alongside 0–9, and a sentence ends with the purnabiram ।. More than 120 languages are spoken in Nepal; Maithili, Bhojpuri, Newari and many others have their own collections, linked from the Nepali page.

To type Nepali on Windows, add the Nepali keyboard under language settings; many people instead use the "Nepali Unicode Romanized" layout, where you type n for न and k for क. On a phone, keyboards such as Gboard offer Nepali, including a mode that turns typed English letters into Devanagari: write namaste and pick नमस्ते. Older documents are often typed in the Preeti font, which is not Unicode: without the font the text turns into Latin gibberish, and online Preeti-to-Unicode converters fix it.

The Nepal currency symbol: the Nepali rupee (NPR, 100 paisa) has no Unicode sign of its own. In Nepali the usual abbreviation is रु. before the amount, as in रु. ५००, and in English Rs. or NPR; ₨, the generic rupee sign, is what people paste. The Indian rupee ₹ belongs to India: the Nepali rupee is pegged to it at 1.6 to 1.