North Korea Emoji & Symbols

🇰🇵 the North Korean flag is the first North Korea emoji people look for, and its colours make a heart row of their own, ❤️💙🤍. ⭐ stands in for the red star on the flag, and ⚪ for the white disc it sits on.

🐎 is the closest emoji to Chollima (천리마), the winged horse of Korean legend said to cover a thousand li in a day. It gave its name to the Chollima Movement of the late 1950s, stands as a bronze statue on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang, and is the nickname of the national football teams. 🏔️ and 🌋 are Mount Paektu (백두산), at 2,744 m the highest mountain of the Korean peninsula: a volcano on the border with China whose crater holds Heaven Lake, Chŏnji. Paektu appears on the national emblem together with a hydroelectric power station, ⚡, and two sheaves of rice, 🌾.

Several national symbols have emoji stand-ins: 🌲 the pine, the national tree; and 🐕 for the Pungsan dog, a white hunting dog from the mountains of the north-east. The national bird, the Korean magpie (which replaced the goshawk in 2023), and the national flower, the white magnolia mongnan (목란), have no emoji of their own. 🐅, the tiger of Korean folk tales, belongs to the whole peninsula. People searching for the North Korea symbol with a hammer, sickle and brush mean the emblem of the Workers' Party of Korea: a worker's hammer, a farmer's sickle and an intellectual's writing brush. Unicode has no single character for it; the nearest emoji are 🔨 and 🖌️, and there is no sickle emoji.

North Korean flag emoji: copy and paste 🇰🇵, and why Windows shows KP

The North Korean flag emoji is not one picture character. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇰 and 🇵, the country code KP (from Korea, Democratic People's Republic), 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 KP. Copy it anyway: phones with flag support display it as a flag. On Discord you can also type :flag_kp:. Do not confuse it with 🇰🇷, the South Korean flag, KR, which was one of the ten flags of the original Japanese phone emoji; 🇰🇵 reached most phones later, around 2015, together with most other country flags.

The flag itself was adopted in 1948, the year the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was proclaimed on 9 September. In Korean it is the Ramhongsaek Konghwaguk-gi, the blue-and-red flag of the republic: a broad red band edged with thin white stripes between two blue bands, and a red five-pointed star in a white circle near the hoist. For every other flag see our Flag Emoji collection, and our South Korea collection for 🇰🇷.

North Korean food emoji: 🍜 🥬 🫙 🥟 🍶

🍜 is the closest emoji to Pyongyang naengmyŏn, buckwheat noodles served in a cold, clear broth, the city's most famous dish; the Okryu-gwan restaurant on the bank of the Taedong River is the best-known place to eat it. Its spicier cousin, Hamhŭng naengmyŏn, comes from the east-coast city of Hamhŭng. 🍚 rice and maize are staple foods, 🥟 are mandu, dumplings, and 🍲 covers the soups and stews served with them. A Korean place setting is a spoon and chopsticks together, 🥄🥢, both usually of metal.

There is no kimchi emoji, so people build it from 🥬🌶️🫙: napa cabbage, red pepper and the earthenware jar it ferments in. In late autumn families and neighbours make the winter's kimchi together, and UNESCO inscribed the tradition of kimchi-making in the DPRK as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2015 (South Korea's kimjang was inscribed separately in 2013). 🍶 stands for soju and rice liquor, and 🍺 for Taedonggang beer, brewed in Pyongyang with equipment bought from the old Ushers brewery in Trowbridge, England.

Holidays, music and sports emoji 🌕 🎶 ⚽ 🏋️

Lunar New Year, Sŏl, and Chusok, the harvest festival on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, 🌕, are family holidays shared with South Korea: on Chusok people visit their ancestors' graves with food and bow to them, and at New Year children fly 🪁 kites and play folk games. Pyongyang marks New Year's Eve and the big national anniversaries, among them Foundation Day on 9 September, with 🎆 fireworks over the Taedong River. 🎶 is Arirang, the folk song every Korean knows; UNESCO lists Arirang folk song in the DPRK since 2014. 🪘 is the closest emoji to the hourglass changgo drum, 🪭 to the fan dance, and 🎭 stands for the stage and the huge synchronised mass performances Pyongyang is known for.

⚽ football has the most famous story: at the 1966 World Cup in England North Korea beat Italy 1–0 at Ayresome Park in Middlesbrough with a goal by Pak Doo-ik, then led Portugal 3–0 in the quarter-final before Eusébio's four goals turned it into a 5–3 defeat. The women's teams have since won both the under-17 and under-20 Women's World Cups more than once. 🏋️ weightlifting has brought the country many Olympic gold medals, 🤸 stands for the gymnast Hong Un-jong, Olympic vault champion in 2008, and 🥋 for taekwondo in its ITF style. 🤼 fits ssirŭm, Korean wrestling, which the two Koreas registered with UNESCO together in 2018, their first joint inscription. 🏓 recalls 1991, when a unified Korean women's team won the world table tennis title in Chiba, Japan, and at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang athletes of both Koreas marched together and played as one women's 🏒 ice hockey team. 🏃 is the Pyongyang Marathon, run every April, and open to foreign amateur runners since 2014.

Pyongyang and the country in emoji 🏙️ 🚇 ⛰️ 🏖️

🏙️ is Pyongyang, the capital on the Taedong River. 🚇 is its metro, one of the deepest in the world at roughly 100 metres below ground, known for stations decorated with chandeliers and mosaics; 🚎 and 🚊 are the trolleybuses and trams that carry much of the city's traffic. 🏨 is the Ryugyong Hotel, the 105-storey pyramid that dominates the skyline; work on it began in 1987 and it has never opened.

⛰️ is Mount Kumgang, the Diamond Mountains on the east coast, and 🏞️ Mount Myohyang with its Buddhist temple Pohyon-sa. Three UNESCO World Heritage sites lie in the country: the Complex of Koguryo Tombs, painted burial chambers about 1,500 years old, inscribed in 2004; the Historic Monuments and Sites in Kaesong, the capital of the Koryo dynasty that gave Korea its name in English, inscribed in 2013; and Mount Kumgang – Diamond Mountain from the Sea, inscribed in 2025. 🌊🏖️ are the East Sea coast around Wŏnsan, where the large Wonsan-Kalma beach resort opened in 2025. About 26 million people live in North Korea by CLDR's estimate, and very few of them can reach the global internet; the country runs a closed national intranet, Kwangmyong, so much of the 🇰🇵 you see online comes from people writing about North Korea from elsewhere.

North Korea symbols: the won sign ₩, Chosŏn'gŭl and 《 》

The North Korean won symbol is ₩, the same character as the South Korean won; the currency code is KPW, the Korean word is 원 (wŏn) and one won is divided into 100 chon. ￦ is the full-width form used in East Asian text. In HTML write ₩. Both Koreas share the name because both took it over from the currency of earlier Korea.

Korean, spoken by about 23 million people in North Korea by CLDR's estimate, is called Chosŏnmal (조선말) in the North, and its standard is Munhwaŏ (문화어), the cultured language of Pyongyang. The alphabet is called Chosŏn'gŭl (조선글) rather than Hangul, and North Korea counts it as 40 letters: the doubled consonants ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅆ ㅉ come after ㅎ, and dictionaries file words beginning with a silent ㅇ under the vowels after the consonants. Some letter names differ from the South's: ㄱ is kiŭk (기윽), ㄷ tiŭt (디읃), ㅅ siŭt (시읏). The spelling also keeps ㄹ and ㄴ at the start of words where the South drops them, so the newspaper is 로동신문 Rodong Sinmun (South Korean 노동, nodong) and the common surname 이 Lee is written 리 Ri. Quotation marks are the double angle brackets 《 》, with 〈 〉 for quotes inside quotes, where South Korea uses “ ”. For everything else about the script see our Korean collection.

In Latin letters North Korean names are usually written in the McCune–Reischauer system, which marks two vowels with a breve: ŏ for ㅓ and ŭ for ㅡ, as in P'yŏngyang and Chosŏn, with an apostrophe for aspirated consonants. North Korea's own English publications usually leave the marks off (Pyongyang, Chollima). To type them on a Mac switch to the ABC Extended input source and press Option + B, then o or u; in Microsoft Word type 014F or 016D and press Alt + X; in HTML use ŏ for ŏ and ŭ for ŭ. For Chosŏn'gŭl itself add a Korean keyboard on your phone or computer, or tap the letters above to copy them.