Sun Emoji & Symbols

☀️ Sun is the one most people mean by "the sun emoji": a yellow or orange disc with rays, meaning sunshine, clear weather, summer, warmth and a good mood. Its official Unicode name is black sun with rays, because it was added in 1993 as a plain text character and only later got a colour emoji look. 🌞 Sun with face is the friendlier version, a smiling sun that says "good morning", "what a lovely day" or "you are my sunshine"; it arrived with the big emoji batch of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and has a moon partner, 🌝 full moon face.

The sun-and-cloud emoji form a forecast scale, sunniest first: ☀️ clear sky, 🌤️ mostly sunny (sun behind small cloud), ⛅ partly sunny (sun behind cloud), 🌥️ mostly cloudy (sun behind large cloud) and 🌦️ sun with showers (sun behind rain cloud). ⛅ is the oldest of the four and came into Unicode 5.2 in 2009 from a Japanese broadcasting standard; 🌤️ 🌥️ 🌦️ were filled in by Unicode 7.0 in 2014, which is why they need the invisible variation selector to show in colour and sometimes appear as flat outlines in older apps.

🔆 Bright button and 🔅 dim button are the screen-brightness icons from a laptop keyboard, officially high brightness symbol and low brightness symbol. People use 🔆 as a small, neat sun when ☀️ feels too big, and as the "brighten up" or "turn the lights on" emoji; 🔅 is the quiet, dimmed version for a soft, low-key mood. The full Weather Emoji collection has the rest of the sky: clouds, rain, snow and wind.

Sunrise emoji and sunset emoji: 🌅 🌄 🌇 🌆

🌅 Sunrise shows the sun coming up over the sea and is the standard "good morning" and "new day" emoji; 🌄 sunrise over mountains is the same moment inland and is the one hikers and early risers reach for. Both are also used for a fresh start after a hard time, which is why they turn up next to 🙏 and 💪 in motivational posts. The Good Morning & Good Night Emoji collection has the morning routine around them, coffee and alarm clocks included.

🌇 Sunset, officially sunset over buildings, is the evening sun sinking behind a city skyline, and 🌆 cityscape at dusk is a minute later, with the sky turned purple and the windows lit. There is no plain sunset-over-the-sea emoji in Unicode, so 🌅 does double duty: in a caption it reads as sunset or sunrise depending on the words around it. For golden-hour photos people pair 🌇 with 🧡 💜 and 📸; for a slow evening with 🍷 or 🍹.

Sun text symbols: ☼ ☀ ☉ and the sunbursts

If you want a sun that is not an emoji, a black sun that sits in a line of text and takes the colour of your font, use ☼ white sun with rays or the text form of ☀. ☼ is the older of the two: it was character 15 on the original IBM PC in 1981, which is why Alt+15 still types it on Windows, and it stays a line-art sun everywhere because it has no emoji version at all. ☀ without the emoji variation selector is also plain; most phones add the selector automatically, so if your ☀️ comes out coloured when you wanted black, paste ☼ instead. 🌣 white sun is a rarer outline sun with no rays, added in Unicode 7.0 and shown by fewer fonts.

☉ Sun is the astronomical and astrological sun symbol: a circle with a dot at its centre. Astrologers write a birth chart's sun sign with it, astronomers use it as a unit in M☉ (the mass of the Sun) and L☉ (its luminosity), and alchemists used the same sign for gold. The maths character ⊙ circled dot operator looks the same and is often pasted as a stand-in; both are in Unicode 1.1, both work in most fonts, but ☉ is the one that means the Sun.

The radiating stars of the old Zapf Dingbats set read as suns in text decoration: ✺ sixteen-pointed asterisk is the fullest sunburst, ❂ circled open-centre eight-pointed star looks like a sun with a corona, ✹ is a twelve-pointed burst and ✴️ eight-pointed star is a sunburst that most phones turn into an orange emoji. The newer geometric set adds matching weights, 🟎 🟏 🟐 for eight points and 🟒 🟓 for twelve, so a divider like ✺ ☼ ✺ or ❂ ⋆ ❂ can be tuned from thin to bold. The small ray marks 🗤 🗥 🗦 🗧 are the comic "shine" lines drawn around something bright.

What the sun emoji means from a girl or a guy

In a text, ☀️ and 🌞 are warm but not loaded. From a friend they mean "it's a beautiful day", "good morning" or simply good vibes; a sun at the end of a message softens it the way a smile would. From a girl or a guy you are getting to know, a sun emoji usually says you brighten their day, which is friendly and a little affectionate rather than openly flirty; the flirting starts when it comes with 😘 💛 or "my sunshine". Lovers use 🌞🌝 as a sun-and-moon pair, two different people who fit together.

☀️ also describes personality: a "sunshine person" or "golden retriever energy" is someone cheerful and open, and ☀️ in a bio means exactly that. On Instagram and TikTok it tags summer content, beach days, tan lines and golden hour, often as ☀️🌊 or ☀️🍹. 🥵 and 🌡️ switch the meaning to too much sun, a heat wave or sunburn, and 🧴 🕶️ 👒 are the sun-protection trio for reminders to put on sunscreen.

Suns in other scripts and on flags

The Chinese and Japanese character 日 means sun and day, and 日本, Japan, means "origin of the sun"; 旭 is the rising sun, and ㊐ is 日 in a circle, used in Japanese for Sunday in compact timetables and calendars. The Egyptian hieroglyph 𓇳 is the sun disc, the sign of the sun god Ra and the word for day; it needs a font with Egyptian hieroglyphs, so check it on your own phone before putting it in a username.

Fourteen flag emoji carry a sun as their main motif. 🇯🇵 Japan's red disc is the Hinomaru, the sun circle; 🇧🇩 Bangladesh's red disc is the sun rising over Bengal. 🇦🇷 Argentina and 🇺🇾 Uruguay show the Sun of May with a face, 🇵🇭 the Philippines an eight-rayed sun for its first provinces, 🇹🇼 Taiwan a white sun with twelve rays, 🇳🇵 Nepal a sun under a moon, 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan a golden sun and eagle, 🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan a sun seen through the crown of a yurt, 🇲🇰 North Macedonia a sun whose rays reach the edges, and 🇲🇼 Malawi, 🇷🇼 Rwanda, 🇳🇦 Namibia and 🇦🇬 Antigua and Barbuda rising or full suns of their own. Each flag has its own page with the story of its design.