Restroom & Public Sign Emoji

🚻 Restroom is the sign with both figures, the one on the door of a public or all-gender toilet, and it is the restroom sign emoji people mean when they ask for a bathroom emoji. 🚹 Men's room and 🚺 Women's room are the two single-figure doors; most platforms draw them on a coloured square so they still read as a sign rather than a person. 🚾 WC is the lettered version. WC stands for water closet, an old British name for a flush toilet, and the two letters are still what you see on doors across Europe and in Japan, which is why the emoji exists.

🚼 Baby symbol is not a baby: it is the nursery or baby-changing-room sign, the one next to 🚻 in a shopping centre. For an actual infant use 👶, which lives in the Baby Emoji collection. 🚽 Toilet is the fixture itself and the answer to “is there a toilet emoji” (there has been one since Unicode 6.0 in 2010); the shower, bath and toilet paper are in the Bathroom & Toilet Emoji collection. 🛉 Boys symbol and 🛊 Girls symbol are text characters from Unicode 7.0 (2014), taken from the old Webdings font: plain black pictograms with no emoji colour, handy where you want a restroom glyph to match the font.

All of the 🚹 🚺 🚻 🚼 🚾 signs arrived together in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, carried over from the Japanese mobile emoji sets, along with 🚰 🚮 🏧 and the four airport signs below. That is why the set looks like a Japanese station concourse: it is one.

Accessibility signs: ♿ wheelchair symbol and the 2019 additions

♿ Wheelchair symbol is the International Symbol of Access, the white figure on a blue square that marks accessible entrances, parking spaces, toilets and lifts. A Danish design student, Susanne Koefoed, drew it in 1968 and Rehabilitation International adopted it in 1969; Unicode encoded it in version 4.1 in 2005. As a sign it means “accessible here”, so it belongs on event pages, listings and directions rather than as a stand-in for a person.

For people, Unicode 12.0 (2019) added a whole accessibility set: 🧑‍🦽 person in a manual wheelchair, 🧑‍🦼 person in a motorized wheelchair, the chairs on their own 🦽 🦼, 🦯 the white cane and 🧑‍🦯 a person using one, 🦮 guide dog and 🐕‍🦺 service dog, 🦻 an ear with a hearing aid and 🧏 a deaf person signing. Each person emoji takes skin tones and gender variants.

One warning about ♿: in gaming chats and Steam names it gets thrown around as an insult for a bad player. It is a sign for access, and using it that way lands badly outside those lobbies.

Finding your way: ℹ️ information, 🛗 elevator, 🚰 water, 🏧 ATM, 🅿️ parking

ℹ️ Information is the lowercase letter i of an information desk or help point. It has been in Unicode since version 3.0 (1999) as a letterlike symbol and became an emoji later, so typed without the emoji selector it shows as the small text letter ℹ; the emoji form is the one on a blue square. 🛈 Circled information source is a text-only sibling from Unicode 7.0, a plain i in a circle that takes the colour of the surrounding text: the right choice for documents, UI mock-ups and anywhere the blue square looks loud.

🛗 Elevator was the last big gap in the set: it only arrived in Unicode 13.0 in 2020, ten years after the restroom signs, after years of people improvising with ↕️ or 🔼🔽. 🚪 Door doubles as an exit or entrance in directions, and 🪧 Placard (also 2020) is any sign on a stick, from a protest board to a “this way” post. 🚏 Bus stop, Ⓜ️ circled M (the metro sign in many cities) and 🅿️ P button (parking) cover the street outside.

🚰 Potable water is the drinking-water tap sign; its crossed-out twin 🚱 means the water is not safe to drink. 🚮 Litter in bin sign is the “put litter in its place” figure stamped on packaging and bins, while 🗑️ is the bin itself. 🏧 ATM sign is the cash machine sign as Japan writes it; the four letters make it readable in any language. ☎️ ✆ ☏ are telephone signs, 📶 and 🛜 mark a Wi-Fi spot, 🆘 🧯 ⚕️ are the emergency, fire-extinguisher and medical-aid signs you see beside a stairwell.

Airport signs: 🛂 passport control, 🛃 customs, 🛄 baggage claim, 🛅 left luggage

The four airport emoji copy the standard terminal pictograms almost line for line. 🛂 Passport control is an officer at a booth, the sign for immigration or border control; 🛃 Customs is an officer inspecting a case; 🛄 Baggage claim is a suitcase on a carousel, and 🛅 Left luggage is a case in a locker, the sign for a luggage storage or lost-and-found counter. They came in with Unicode 6.0 in 2010.

Put them in order and they tell the day: 🛫 🧳 🛂 🛄 🛬 reads as take-off, bags, border, carousel, landing. 🎫 is the ticket and 🆔 the ID you show at the gate. For the planes, hotels and landmarks around them see the Travel Emoji and Airplane & Aviation Emoji collections.

Posted rules and Japanese signboards

The red-circle signs are the rules pinned to walls: 🚭 No smoking, 🚯 No littering, 🚱 Non-potable water, 🚷 No pedestrians, 🚳 No bicycles, 📵 No mobile phones and 🔞 No one under eighteen, the sign of adults-only venues that online became the NSFW marker. ⛔ No entry and 🚫 Prohibited are the general ones; 🛇 is a text-only prohibited sign and ☡ a text caution sign, both plain glyphs. ⚠️ Warning is the triangle on every hazard. The full road and hazard set is in the Warning & Prohibited Sign Emoji collection.

The square kanji emoji are real Japanese signboards. 🈳 Vacancy (空, “empty”) glows on the roof of a free taxi and on a car park with spaces; 🈵 No vacancy (満, “full”) is the same lot when it is full. 🈺 Open for business (営業中) hangs in a shop door, 🈁 Here (ココ) marks a spot, 🈚 Free of charge (無料) and 🈶 Not free of charge (有料) sit on price boards, with 🆓 as the Latin FREE sign, 🈂️ Service charge, 🉐 Bargain and 🈹 Discount on sale tags, and 🈯 Reserved, 🈲 Prohibited and 🉑 Acceptable on seats and notices. Their meanings as emoji are explained one by one in Japanese Emoji Meanings.