Sweden Emoji & Symbols

The Swedish flag emoji 🇸🇪 is not one picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, S and E, Sweden's ISO country code, which phones and apps draw together as the flag. Most country flags, Sweden's among them, reached phones as emoji in 2015. Windows' own emoji font draws no country flags, so on a Windows PC the same characters show as the letters SE; the person you send it to on an iPhone, Android phone or Mac still sees 🇸🇪.

The flag is a yellow Nordic cross on a blue field, the cross set toward the pole like those of Denmark, Norway and Finland. Blue and yellow are also the colours of the Swedish coat of arms, three gold crowns on blue. When a flag will not do, Swedes paste the colours as hearts or squares, 💙💛 or 🟦🟨, and the national ice hockey team in blue and yellow is simply called Tre Kronor, Three Crowns 👑.

The day of the flag is 6 June, Sweden's National Day (Sveriges nationaldag), which remembers Gustav Vasa's election as king in 1523 and the constitution of 1809; it has been a public holiday since 2005. 🇸🇪🎉 is the usual post, with Grattis på nationaldagen!. The flag goes up for sport even more often: 🇸🇪🏒 or 🇸🇪⚽ with Heja Sverige!, Go Sweden.

Swedish symbols and their meanings: three crowns, the Dala horse, the moose and runes

👑 Crown stands for Tre Kronor, the three crowns of Sweden's small coat of arms, and for the monarchy; the great coat of arms adds golden 🦁 lions. 🐎 Horse is the nearest emoji to the dalahäst, the carved wooden Dala horse from Dalarna, painted red with flowery kurbits patterns and now a symbol of the whole country. 🫎 Moose is Sweden's unofficial national animal, the älg: the yellow moose warning signs by the road are a favourite photo for visitors, and 🫎⚠️🚗 is the joke.

Sweden has more runestones than any other country, most of them raised in the Viking Age, and the province of Uppland alone has well over a thousand. Most of the runestones visible in Sweden's landscape are written in the Younger Futhark, an alphabet of 16 runes, shown above in its traditional order: ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚬ ᚱ ᚴ, ᚼ ᚾ ᛁ ᛅ ᛋ, ᛏ ᛒ ᛘ ᛚ ᛦ. The Rök runestone in Östergötland, from the 800s, carries the longest known runic inscription. Runes have been in Unicode since 1999, so they copy and paste like any letter, which is why they turn up in Swedish symbol tattoos; 🪨 stands for a runestone and ⚔️🛡️🪓⛵ for the Vikings.

Some Swedish symbols are everyday things: 🏡 is the red wooden cottage with white corners, painted in Falu rödfärg, the red paint from the copper mine at Falun; 🌲 and 🛶 are the forests and lakes; and 🦌, with no reindeer emoji in Unicode, stands for the reindeer herded by the Sámi in the north.

Swedish letters Å Ä Ö, the krona symbol kr and how to type them

Swedish adds three letters to A–Z, and they come last in the alphabet, in this order: Å å, Ä ä, Ö ö. They are letters in their own right, not A and O with decoration, and they change words: hår is hair but har means has, kör is a choir but kor are cows, and ö alone means island, å a small river. The three letters were fixed in print by the Swedish Bible of 1541. Å sounds roughly like the o in more, Ä like the e in bed, Ö like the vowel in French peu. É é marks a stressed ending in loanwords such as idé, armé and kafé, and à means each in prices, as in 3 st à 10 kr. More Swedish letters are in our Swedish collection.

How to type å, ä and ö: on Windows hold Alt and type on the number pad 0197 Å, 0229 å, 0196 Ä, 0228 ä, 0214 Ö, 0246 ö, 0201 É, 0233 é. On the US-International layout, AltGr + W gives å, AltGr + Q ä, AltGr + P ö and AltGr + E é. On a Mac, Option + A is å (add Shift for Å), and Option + U followed by a or o gives ä or ö. On a phone, hold A or O for a moment and pick the letter. In HTML write å, ä, ö. A Swedish keyboard has its own keys for all three to the right of P and L, § to the left of 1, and ¤ on Shift + 4.

The Swedish krona symbol is simply kr, written after the amount with a space: 25 kr, or 25:- on price tags, with a decimal comma when öre appear (12,50 kr). The ISO code is SEK; Sweden kept its own currency and voted against the euro in 2003. In everyday life most Swedes pay by card 💳 or with Swish 📱, the banks' phone payment app, and many shops and buses no longer take cash. Quotation marks are written with the same mark at both ends, ”så här” and ’så här’.

Sweden has five national minority languages: Finnish, Meänkieli, Sámi, Romani and Yiddish. Finnish and Meänkieli use the same Ä Ö as Swedish; Northern Sámi, the most widely spoken Sámi language, adds Á Č Đ Ŋ Š Ŧ Ž, all in the grid above. By CLDR's estimates about 10 million of Sweden's roughly 10.6 million people speak Swedish, around 9 million speak English and some 230,000 speak Finnish; see also our Swedish, Finnish, English and Yiddish collections.

Sweden emoji for nature, fika and food

Swedes spend their free time outdoors, and the law helps: allemansrätten, the right of public access, lets people walk, camp ⛺🏕️, paddle 🛶 and pick wild berries 🫐 and mushrooms 🍄 where access is allowed, as long as they leave the land as they found it. Fishing 🎣 is not part of the right of public access and often requires a permit. 🌊⛵⛴️ are the archipelagos off Stockholm and Gothenburg, and the far north is Lapland: 🌌 the northern lights over Abisko, 🌞 the midnight sun of early summer, ❄️ and 🧊 for the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, rebuilt every winter from the ice of the Torne River. 🐻 🐺 🦊 and 🦭 are the wild animals people photograph, and 🪿 is for Nils Holgersson, the boy in Selma Lagerlöf's book who flies across Sweden on the back of a goose.

☕ Fika is the Swedish coffee break, coffee with something sweet, taken at home and at work alike. 🥐 is the nearest emoji to the kanelbulle, the cinnamon bun, which even has its own day on 4 October; 🍰 stands for prinsesstårta, the green marzipan cake, and 🍪 for ginger biscuits, pepparkakor. 🍬 is lördagsgodis, the Saturday sweets that Swedish children are traditionally allowed once a week.

On the table, 🧆 is often used as a stand-in for köttbullar, meatballs served with potatoes 🥔, cream sauce and lingonberry jam; 🐟 is pickled herring, sill; 🦐🥪 the open prawn sandwich räksmörgås; 🍞 crispbread, knäckebröd; 🫓 the northern flatbread tunnbröd, rolled round a hot dog 🌭 and mashed potato into a tunnbrödsrulle; 🧀 is Västerbotten cheese. 🥫 is surströmming, fermented Baltic herring sold in cans that bulge with gas and are best opened outdoors. 🥃 is a glass of snaps and 🥂 Skål!, cheers. The word smörgåsbord itself is Swedish.

Midsommar emoji, Lucia, Christmas and the Swedish year

Midsommar is the high point of the Swedish year. On Midsummer Eve, a Friday between 19 and 25 June, people raise a midsommarstång, a maypole dressed in birch leaves 🌿 and flowers 💐, wear flower crowns, and dance round it in rings 🧑‍🤝‍🧑, hopping like frogs 🐸 to the song Små grodorna, the little frogs. Lunch is herring 🐟, new potatoes 🥔 with dill and strawberries 🍓 with cream, with snaps 🥃 and drinking songs. 🇸🇪🌼🍓☀️ with Glad midsommar! is the post of the day.

The rest of the year has its own emoji. On Valborg, 30 April, towns light big bonfires 🔥 and choirs sing in the spring. At Easter children dress up as Easter witches 🧙, påskkärringar, and go door to door for sweets, after the old belief that witches flew off on broomsticks 🧹 before Easter; homes are decorated with birch twigs hung with coloured feathers 🪶, and eggs 🥚🐣 are painted. In August comes the kräftskiva, the crayfish party: crayfish 🦞, paper hats 🥳 and paper lanterns in the shape of a smiling moon 🌕.

Lucia, on 13 December, is a procession in the winter dark: a girl in white with a crown of candles 🕯️ leads singers carrying candles, with star boys 🌟 in tall paper hats, and saffron buns, lussekatter, are eaten. Christmas (jul) is celebrated on Christmas Eve, with the julbord buffet, the gift-bringing tomte 🎅, the straw Yule goat 🐐, and the 3:05 p.m. TV broadcast of Donald Duck 🦆, Kalle Anka, which has aired on Christmas Eve since 1960. On 10 December the Nobel Prizes 🏅 are awarded in Stockholm, except for the Peace Prize, which is awarded in Oslo; the date marks the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.

Made in Sweden: music, games, design and sport emoji

🎤 is Eurovision, which Sweden loves: ABBA won it for Sweden in 1974 with Waterloo, Loreen won twice, in 2012 and 2023, and the national selection show Melodifestivalen is one of the most watched programmes on Swedish television. 🎶 is the Swedish pop songwriters behind countless international hits, and 🎧 is Spotify, founded in Stockholm in 2006. 🎮 and ⛏️ are Minecraft, made in Stockholm by Mojang, though ⛏️ is also old Sweden: the Falun copper mine, which gave the red paint its colour. 📚 is Astrid Lindgren, whose Pippi Longstocking first appeared in 1945, and Selma Lagerlöf, who in 1909 became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

🛋️ and 📦 are IKEA, founded by Ingvar Kamprad in Småland in 1943, whose furniture comes flat-packed and is named with Swedish words and place names. 🚗 is Volvo from Gothenburg, whose engineer Nils Bohlin designed the three-point seat belt in 1959. 🏰 is the royal palace and castles such as Kalmar, ⛪ the country's churches, 🚇 the Stockholm metro, often called the world's longest art gallery for the art in its stations, and 🌉 the Öresund Bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen, opened in 2000.

In sport, 🏒 ice hockey and ⚽ football are the big two, with 🎿 cross-country skiing close behind: Vasaloppet, run every March over 90 km from Sälen to Mora, has been held since 1922. Add ⛷️ alpine skiing, ⛸️ long-distance skating on natural ice, 🥌 curling, where Sweden has won Olympic gold, 🎾 Björn Borg, ⛳ Annika Sörenstam, 🏓 Jan-Ove Waldner and 🤾 handball.