Philippines Emoji & Symbols

🇵🇭 is the Philippine flag emoji. Like every country flag emoji it is not one character but two regional indicator letters, P and H, which phones and browsers draw as the flag. Windows is the exception: in most Windows apps you see the letters PH instead of a flag, while the person you send it to on a phone sees 🇵🇭.

The flag has a blue stripe over a red one and a white triangle at the hoist holding a golden sun with eight rays and three five-pointed stars. The eight rays stand for the first eight provinces that rose against Spain in 1896, and the three stars for Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. There is no separate emoji for the flag's sun or stars, so people spell them out as ☀️⭐⭐⭐, and write the colours as 💙❤️🤍💛.

The flag is unusual in law: in a state of war it is flown with the red stripe on top. That is why some people search for a "Philippines war flag emoji", but there is no such emoji; 🇵🇭 always shows the peacetime flag with blue on top.

For official national symbols and popular associations, Filipinos borrow the closest emoji: 🦅 for the Philippine eagle, the national bird; 🐃 for the carabao, a water buffalo often called the national animal; 🌼 for sampaguita, the white jasmine that is the national flower; 🌳 for narra, the national tree; 🥭 for mango and 🐟 for bangus (milkfish), often called the national fruit and fish, though carabao, mango and bangus are not official national symbols.

Filipino food emoji: silog, lechon, halo-halo and pancit

Rice comes with almost every meal, so 🍚 is the most Filipino food emoji there is. A breakfast of garlic fried rice and a fried egg, the silog in tapsilog and longsilog, is 🍚🧄🍳; 🍞 is pandesal and ☕ the morning coffee, kapeng barako if you are from Batangas.

At a handaan, a party or fiesta table, 🐖 stands for lechon, the whole roasted pig, 🍗 for fried chicken (Jollibee's Chickenjoy included), 🍲 for sinigang, tinola or bulalo, 🍜 for pancit, the noodles served at birthdays for a long life, 🥟 for siomai and 🍢 for street food on sticks such as fishballs, isaw and barbecue. 🥚 is balut. Adobo, the dish many call the national one, has no emoji; people send 🍗🍚 or 🍲.

For merienda, 🍧 is halo-halo, shaved ice with milk, beans, fruit, ube and leche flan, 🍮 is leche flan on its own, 🍠 is kamote cue, and 💜 with 🍠 means ube, the purple yam that colours everything from ice cream to pandesal. 🍌 covers saba banana, turon and banana cue, 🥥 is buko, and 🍍 is piña, both the fruit and the fine pineapple-fibre cloth used for the barong Tagalog.

Philippine holidays and the emoji Filipinos send

Christmas in the Philippines is famous for starting early: carols and decorations appear with the first of the "ber" months in September. 🎄 is the tree, and 🌟 or ⭐ stands for the parol, the star-shaped lantern hung in windows everywhere. Simbang Gabi, the nine dawn Masses from 16 to 24 December, ends with the Noche Buena feast on Christmas Eve.

At New Year, families set out round fruits for luck and prosperity, often twelve kinds, so 🍇🍊🍉🍈 goes next to 🎆 and 🧨 in a Manigong Bagong Taon message. On 1 and 2 November, Undas, families visit their dead at the cemetery with 🕯️ candles and 💐 flowers, and Holy Week is 🙏✝️.

Every town has a fiesta, and the big ones have their own emoji: 🥁💃 for the drum-and-dance processions of Sinulog in Cebu and Ati-Atihan in Kalibo, both in January in honour of the Santo Niño, 🎭 for the smiling masks of MassKara in Bacolod, and 🪅 for the piñata at a child's birthday party. Independence Day on 12 June, the day independence was proclaimed in Kawit, Cavite, in 1898, is 🇵🇭🎆. Eid al-Fitr is a national holiday too, marked with 🕌, above all in Muslim Mindanao.

Islands, animals and the sports Filipinos cheer for

The Philippines has more than 7,600 islands, so 🏝️🏖️🌊 are everyday emoji: Palawan, Boracay, Siargao's surf (🏄), the reefs of Tubbataha (🐠🪸🤿) and the sunset over Manila Bay (🌅). 🌋 is Mayon, the near-perfect cone in Albay, or Taal; 🌾 and 🏞️ are the rice terraces of the Cordilleras; 🦈 stands in for the butanding, the whale shark, and 🐢 for the sea turtles. 🌀 and ☔ are the typhoons and rainy season everyone plans around.

Basketball is the national obsession, 🏀 for the PBA, Asia's first professional basketball league, and for Gilas Pilipinas. 🥊 is boxing and Manny Pacquiao, world champion in eight weight divisions; 🏐 is volleyball, 🎱 billiards and Efren "Bata" Reyes, and 🥋 stands in for arnis, the stick-fighting art that is the national martial art and sport. 🥇 marks the country's first Olympic gold medals: Hidilyn Diaz in weightlifting (🏋️) at Tokyo 2020 and Carlos Yulo's two golds in gymnastics (🤸) at Paris 2024.

Getting around has no exact emoji: the jeepney, first built from US Army jeeps left after the Second World War, becomes 🚙, the tricycle (a motorcycle with a sidecar) 🏍️, the outrigger bangka 🛶 and the inter-island ferry ⛴️. For the millions of Filipinos working abroad, ✈️📦💸 says it all: the flight, the balikbayan box packed for home and the padala, money sent to the family.

How to type the peso sign ₱ and Ñ

₱ is the Philippine peso sign (Unicode U+20B1); the currency code is PHP, and many people simply write P or Php when the sign is missing. On Windows, open the emoji panel with Win + ., choose the Symbols tab and then currency symbols; in Word you can type 20B1 and press Alt + X, and in Excel choose Currency and the symbol ₱ Filipino (Philippines). On a Mac, press Ctrl + Cmd + Space and search "peso". On a phone, long-press the $ key on the symbols keyboard; many keyboards offer ₱ there, and if yours does not, copy it from this page. In HTML write ₱.

Ñ (enye) is the one letter of the Filipino alphabet that is not plain A–Z. The 28-letter Filipino alphabet is A to Z with Ñ and the digraph NG; NG is written with the ordinary letters n and g. Ñ comes with Spanish names and words: Santo Niño, Parañaque, Las Piñas, Dasmariñas and piña. On Windows hold Alt and type 164 for ñ or 165 for Ñ on the number pad (or 0241 and 0209); on a Mac press Option + N and then N; on a phone long-press N. HTML has ñ and Ñ. Our Filipino and Spanish pages have the full alphabets, and the Mexico page shows the same Ñ in another peso country.

Baybayin symbols: copy and paste the old Philippine script

Baybayin is the script Tagalog and other Philippine languages were written in before the Latin alphabet took over under Spanish rule, and it is in Unicode as the Tagalog block. It is an abugida: each consonant letter carries the vowel a, so ᜊ is ba and ᜋ is ma. A kudlit mark above changes the vowel to i or e (ᜊᜒ bi), one below to u or o (ᜊᜓ bu), and the cross-shaped ᜔ cancels the vowel altogether; that cross was introduced by Spanish missionaries, and ᜕ pamudpod is a vowel-cancelling stroke in the style of the Mangyan scripts. ᜵ and ᜶ are the single and double punctuation shared by the Philippine scripts.

To write a word, put the pieces together: ᜊ ba + ᜌ᜔ y + ᜊ ba + ᜌᜒ yi + ᜈ᜔ n gives ᜊᜌ᜔ᜊᜌᜒᜈ᜔, "baybayin", and ᜉᜒᜎᜒᜉᜒᜈᜓ is pi-li-pi-no. Old Baybayin used one letter for both da and ra; ᜍ ra and the archaic ra ᜟ were added to Unicode in 2021. If you see empty boxes, your device lacks a Baybayin font such as Noto Sans Tagalog. Baybayin appears on the peso banknotes issued since 2010 and is popular in tattoos and logos; related scripts are still in daily use, Hanunoo and Buhid among the Mangyan of Mindoro and Tagbanwa in Palawan.