Ocean & Sea Emoji

🌊 Water Wave is the ocean emoji. It has been in Unicode since 2010 (version 6.0), and on Apple, Google and most other platforms it is drawn as a curling blue breaker with white foam that clearly nods to Hokusai's woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. People use it for the sea itself, for a beach day, for surfing, for anything "wavy" or flowing, and simply as a splash of blue at the end of a caption.

After the wave come the animals everyone recognises: 🐬 Dolphin for playful and free, 🐳 Spouting Whale for big and gentle, 🦈 Shark for danger or a ruthless deal-maker, 🐙 Octopus for anything with too many arms, 🐚 Spiral Shell for the quiet beach-walk mood and 🐠 Tropical Fish for reefs and aquariums. 🏝️ Desert Island and 🏖️ Beach with Umbrella put you on the shore, and 🌅 Sunrise is drawn as the sun coming up over water on most platforms, so it doubles as an ocean horizon.

Sea animal emoji, from whale to coral

There are three whales. 🐳 Spouting Whale is the cartoon one, round and blue with a spout of water; 🐋 Whale is a more realistic grey or blue whale seen from the side; 🫍 Orca, the black-and-white killer whale, is the newest, added in Emoji 17.0 in 2025, so it still shows as an empty box on many phones. 🐬 Dolphin and 🦭 Seal (2020) complete the marine mammals, and 🦦 Otter is usually read as a sea otter floating on its back.

The fish come in three: 🐟 Fish, the plain blue one; 🐠 Tropical Fish, striped and bright; 🐡 Blowfish, puffed up and spiky. Below them live 🐙 Octopus, 🦑 Squid and 🪼 Jellyfish, and on the sea floor 🦀 Crab, 🦞 Lobster, 🦐 Shrimp, 🦪 Oyster with its pearl, 🐚 Spiral Shell and 🪸 Coral. 🐢 Turtle serves for sea turtles, 🐧 Penguin for the cold seas. There is still no seahorse, starfish or seagull emoji, which is why aesthetic posts borrow ✨ or the hieroglyph fish 𓆟 instead.

The set grew in waves. 🐳 🐋 🐬 🐙 🐚 🐟 🐠 🐡 🐢 were all in the first big emoji release of 2010; 🦀 arrived in 2015; 🦈 🦑 🦐 in 2016 (Unicode 9.0); 🦞 in 2018; 🦪 in 2019; 🦭 in 2020; 🪸 in 2021; 🪼 in 2022; 🫍 in 2025.

Mermaids, surfers, divers and boats

🧜 Merperson is the mermaid emoji, added in Emoji 5.0 (2017). The gendered versions you see on keyboards, 🧜‍♀️ Mermaid and 🧜‍♂️ Merman, are the same character joined to a ♀️ or ♂️ sign with an invisible joiner, so an old device may show them as a merperson followed by a stray gender sign. 🔱 Trident Emblem is Poseidon's and Neptune's weapon and reads as "ruler of the sea" next to it, and it is also the logo-style trident of Ukraine, Barbados and Maserati, so context matters.

In the water: 🏄 Person Surfing, 🏊 Person Swimming, 🤿 Diving Mask (snorkelling or scuba, 2019), 🚣 Person Rowing Boat and 🎣 Fishing Pole. On it: ⛵ Sailboat, 🛶 Canoe, 🚤 Speedboat, 🛥️ Motor Boat, ⛴️ Ferry, 🛳️ Passenger Ship (the cruise ship) and 🚢 Ship (the big cargo or ocean liner). ⚓ Anchor, 🛟 Ring Buoy, 🧭 Compass and 🏴‍☠️ Pirate Flag finish the nautical kit. There is no submarine emoji; people use 🤿 or 🚢 with 🌊 over it.

Aesthetic ocean emoji and what 🌊 means from a girl or a guy

Ocean aesthetic combos stay in one colour family, blue and white: 🌊🐚🫧, 🐬🌊💙, 🪼🫧🩵, 🐚🌊✨. 🫧 Bubbles and 💧 Droplet are the softeners, 🐚 and 🪸 the pastel accents, 🌅 the warm counterpoint. Three or four emoji at the end of a short line (salt water heals everything 🌊🐚) look calmer than a long row. For an "under the sea" theme, line up the animals by depth: 🐬🐠🐙🪸.

On its own, 🌊 rarely means the literal sea in a text. From a girl or a guy it usually says "go with the flow", "chill", or that something is making waves; "wavy" is slang for feeling great or slightly tipsy. 🌊 also stands for "ocean eyes" after Billie Eilish's song, and 🐬 or 🐚 next to a name are soft nicknames. 🦈 is the opposite register: a shark is someone sharp, hungry or dangerous in business or dating.

Ocean text symbols: waves, tildes and hieroglyph fish

For bios, usernames and places that strip colour emoji, plain-text wave symbols do the job and take the colour of your font. The tilde family is the simplest: ~, the fullwidth ～, the Japanese 〜 wave dash (used in Japanese to stretch a sound or mark a range), the ⁓ swung dash and the emoji-style 〰️ Wavy Dash. From maths come ≈ almost equal to, ≋ triple tilde and ∿ sine wave, which stacked as ≋≋≋ or ∿∿∿ make a convincing sea. ⌇ wavy line, ﹏ wavy low line, ﹋ wavy overline and ﹌ double wavy overline draw ripples above or below a word: ﹏﹏ ocean ﹏﹏.

A few signs mean water outright: ♓ Pisces, the two fish of the zodiac; ♒ Aquarius, whose glyph is two wavy lines; ☵ the I Ching trigram for water; 🜄 the alchemical symbol for water, a downward triangle; and ⛯ the map symbol for a lighthouse. The Egyptian hieroglyphs (Unicode 5.2, 2009) give you a whole aquarium that works in any modern font that has them: the fish signs 𓆛 𓆜 𓆝 𓆞 𓆟 𓆡 𓆢 (tilapia, barbel, mullet, elephant-snout fish, and the puffer fish 𓆡), 𓆉 turtle, 𓆩 bivalve shell, 𓈖 the ripple of water that writes the sound n, and 𓊝 a ship under sail. 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 is the classic "fish swimming across the bio" line.