Singapore Emoji & Symbols

🇸🇬 the Singapore flag is the emoji people reach for first: in a bio, after a football score, under National Day photos or at the end of "Home sweet home" when the plane lands at Changi. ❤️🤍 are the flag's colours as hearts, and many Singaporeans sign off patriotic posts with 🇸🇬❤️🤍.

🦁 is the country's own animal in emoji. The name Singapura comes from the Sanskrit for "lion city", and the Malay Annals tell of a prince, Sang Nila Utama, who saw a strange beast on the island, was told it was a lion and named his city after it. The national football team is the Lions, Chinese speakers call the country 狮城 (Shīchéng, "Lion City"), and the red lion-head symbol, introduced in 1986, is used by government agencies, organisations and businesses to show national pride. There is no Merlion emoji, so people write the half-lion, half-fish statue at Marina Bay as 🦁🐟: the lion head for Singapura, the fish tail for Temasek, the old fishing settlement that stood here before it.

The national flower is the Vanda Miss Joaquim, a purple-pink orchid bred in Singapore in the 1890s and chosen in 1981. Unicode has no orchid, so 🪻 is the nearest by colour. The rest of the grid follows daily life: 🍗🍚 and 🦀🌶️ for hawker food, 🏢 for the HDB flats most Singaporeans live in, 🚇 for the MRT, ⛈️ for the afternoon storm that arrives on time, and 🦦 for the city's famous otter families.

Singapore flag emoji 🇸🇬: crescent, five stars and meaning

The flag is two horizontal bands, red over white, with a white crescent moon and five white stars in a circle in the upper hoist corner. Officially, red stands for universal brotherhood and equality, white for pervading and everlasting purity and virtue, the crescent for a young nation on the rise, and the five stars for democracy, peace, progress, justice and equality. It was unveiled on 3 December 1959, during self-government, and formally adopted as the national flag at independence in 1965; 🌙⭐ is the closest emoji spelling of its emblem.

Like every country flag emoji, 🇸🇬 is not a stored picture but two regional indicator letters, 🇸 and 🇬, for the country code SG. Phones and most browsers join the pair into a flag. Windows' own emoji font has no country flags, so a Windows PC shows the letters SG instead, which is why people search for "singapore flag emoji windows"; the person reading on a phone still sees the flag. Copy the whole emoji from the grid, both halves, or a lone letter box will appear.

Its neighbours on a flag keyboard are 🇲🇾 Malaysia, across the Johor Strait, which Singapore was part of from 1963 to 1965, 🇮🇩 Indonesia, a short ferry ride to the south, and 🇧🇳 Brunei, whose dollar is worth exactly one Singapore dollar. Each has its own collection, as do China and India, the homelands of many Singaporeans' grandparents.

National Day and the festivals of four faiths

9 August is National Day, the anniversary of independence in 1965. The National Day Parade is the year's big show: the Red Lions free-fall parachute team drops into the stadium (🪂), a helicopter flies the state flag across the sky (🚁🇸🇬), the crowd sings "Majulah Singapura" and the night ends with fireworks over Marina Bay (🎆🎇). "Happy National Day! 🇸🇬🎆" and "Happy Birthday Singapore 🇸🇬🎂" fill every chat that evening.

The public holidays belong to all the main faiths. At Chinese New Year people exchange 🧧 red packets and pairs of 🍊 mandarin oranges, hang 🏮 lanterns, watch lion and 🐉 dragon dances and eat 🍍 pineapple tarts; at the reunion table families toss yusheng, the raw-fish salad, as high as they can while shouting "Huat ah!", Hokkien for "prosper!". Hari Raya Puasa ends Ramadan (🌇🍽️ is breaking the fast at sunset), with the bazaar and lights of Geylang Serai; Hari Raya Haji follows later in the year. Deepavali lights up Little India with 🪔 oil lamps, Vesak Day fills Buddhist temples (☸️🪷), and Christmas means the light-up on Orchard Road (🎄🛍️).

Two festivals are not public holidays but are everywhere: Mid-Autumn with 🥮 mooncakes and lanterns under the 🌕, and the seventh lunar month, when many Chinese families burn offerings for wandering spirits and getai stages put on shows for living and dead alike 👻.

Hawker food: chicken rice, chilli crab and the art of chope

Singapore eats at hawker centres, open-air food courts of small stalls; hawker culture was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020. The usual emoji: 🍗🍚 Hainanese chicken rice, often called the national dish; 🦀🌶️ chilli crab, mopped up with fried buns; 🍜🥥🦐 laksa, noodles in spicy coconut broth; 🍢🥜 satay with peanut sauce; 🫓🍛 roti prata dipped in curry; 🍲 bak kut teh, peppery pork-rib soup; and the classic breakfast of kaya toast, soft-boiled eggs and kopi, 🍞🧈🥚☕.

To chope a seat is to reserve it, and in a hawker centre you do that by leaving a packet of tissues on the table: 🧻 is the emoji for it, and "chope liao" means "already taken". Makan, the Malay word for eat, is what everyone says when it is time to go ("makan where? 🍽️"), and shiok is the Singlish word for food that is very, very good 🤤. Dessert is 🍧 ice kacang, the shaved ice heaped with syrup and beans, an ice-cream sandwich from a street cart, or 🧋 bubble tea.

Durian, the king of fruits, has no emoji; people send 🤢 or 😍 depending on which side they are on, and the MRT signs that forbid durians on trains are a favourite photo for visitors.

Singapore dollar symbol and the four official languages

The Singapore dollar symbol is the ordinary dollar sign $, written S$ to tell it from the US dollar (code SGD). On a US keyboard, type it with Shift+4; other layouts may differ. Unicode has no separate Singapore dollar sign. A dollar is 100 cents, and the Brunei dollar has been exchanged one for one with it since 1967.

Singapore has four official languages, English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese and Tamil. Malay is the national language: the anthem "Majulah Singapura" ("Onward, Singapore") and military commands are in Malay, written in plain Latin letters. Chinese in Singapore uses simplified characters: the country is 新加坡 (Xīnjiāpō), the old name 星洲 (Xīngzhōu) lives on in newspaper and shop names, and the New Year wish is 恭喜发财 with 福 on the door. Tamil, spoken by the largest Indian community, writes the country சிங்கப்பூர் (Ciṅkappūr). Out of roughly six million people, CLDR estimates around 5.6 million English speakers, 4.6 million Chinese, 840,000 Malay and 130,000 Tamil, with Malayalam and Punjabi among the smaller communities.

To type them, add a Chinese (Pinyin) or Tamil keyboard on your phone, or copy the characters straight from the grid. The English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil collections offer characters and words from each language.