Thailand Emoji & Symbols

The Thailand flag emoji 🇹🇭 shows the Trairanga, the tricolour: red, white, a blue band twice as tall in the middle, then white and red again. It was adopted on 28 September 1917 under King Vajiravudh, replacing a red flag with a white elephant on it, and the usual reading is red for the nation, white for religion and blue for the monarchy. The country's name changed from Siam to Thailand in 1939, went back to Siam from 1945 to 1949, then became Thailand again; in Thai the name is ประเทศไทย, Prathet Thai.

Like every country flag emoji, 🇹🇭 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇹 and 🇭, for the country code TH. Phones, Macs and most browsers join them into the flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters TH instead. Search "Thailand" in your phone's emoji keyboard, or copy it from the grid above.

In 2001 Thailand named three national symbols: the Thai elephant, chang 🐘, the ratchaphruek or golden shower tree, whose hanging yellow flowers bloom in the hot season (🌼 is the nearest emoji), and the sala Thai, the open Thai pavilion. In 2019 the Siamese fighting fish 🐠 became the national aquatic animal. 🙏 is the wai, the greeting with palms pressed together and a slight bow, used for hello, thank you and sorry alike; the higher the hands, the more respect. Thailand is often called the Land of Smiles 😊, and the temples, wat 🛕, with their bell-shaped chedi 🛓 and naga serpents 🐍 running down the stair rails, are the picture most people have of it.

Songkran emoji 💦🔫 and the other Thai holidays

Songkran, the Thai New Year, falls on 13 to 15 April, in the hottest weeks of the year, and is the reason the Songkran emoji are 💦 🔫 🎉. In the morning families make merit at the temple and pour scented water over the hands of parents and elders to ask for their blessing, rot nam dam hua 🫗, often with a jasmine garland 💮; then the whole country goes out and soaks each other with buckets and water guns, on Silom Road and Khao San Road in Bangkok and around the moat in Chiang Mai, to the beat of the long drum 🪘. UNESCO added Songkran in Thailand to its intangible heritage list in 2023. The greeting is สุขสันต์วันสงกรานต์, Happy Songkran.

Loy Krathong comes on the full moon 🌕 of the twelfth month of the Thai lunar calendar, usually in November. People float a krathong, a little raft of banana trunk and leaves folded into a lotus 🪷 with flowers, a candle 🕯️ and incense, on a river or pond, to thank the water goddess and let go of bad luck, so 🪷🕯️🌕 is the Loy Krathong emoji. In Chiang Mai the same nights are Yi Peng, when thousands of paper sky lanterns, khom loi, rise together (🏮 is the closest emoji), with fireworks 🎆.

The Buddhist holy days, Makha Bucha, Visakha Bucha and Asanha Bucha, are marked with candlelit walks three times around the temple 🕯️, and at Khao Phansa, the start of the monks' rainy-season retreat, Ubon Ratchathani parades huge carved candles. Chinese New Year 🧧🐉 fills Bangkok's Chinatown, Yaowarat, with red lanterns and dragon dances. In May, towns in the northeast such as Yasothon fire home-made rockets 🚀 into the sky at Bun Bang Fai to call the rain, and in Dan Sai, in Loei, the Phi Ta Khon festival fills the streets with dancers in tall, long-nosed ghost masks 👻👺. Mother's Day, 12 August, has jasmine 💮 as its flower.

Thai food emoji: pad thai 🍜, tom yum 🍲 and mango sticky rice 🥭

There are no emoji for Thai dishes, so people build them. Pad thai, stir-fried rice noodles with shrimp, egg, tofu and peanuts, served with lime and bean sprouts and promoted as a national dish in the late 1930s and 1940s, is 🍜🦐🥜🍋‍🟩. Tom yum kung, the hot and sour shrimp soup with lemongrass, galangal, lime leaves and chilli, is 🍲🦐🌶️🌿; UNESCO added it to its intangible heritage list in 2024. Green curry and massaman are 🍛 with 🥥 for the coconut milk, and the green papaya salad of the northeast, som tam, pounded with chilli, lime and peanuts, is 🥗🌶️, eaten with sticky rice and grilled chicken, gai yang 🍗.

Rice 🍚 is the meal itself: the word for eating, kin khao, means "eat rice", Thai jasmine rice, hom mali, grows in the paddies 🌾 of the north and northeast, and the everyday lunch is pad kra pao, stir-fried holy basil with a fried egg on top 🍳. Street stalls sell grilled pork skewers, moo ping 🍢, grilled fish 🐟, crab 🦀 and, in the northeast and at night markets, fried crickets 🦗. The best-loved dessert is mango sticky rice, khao niao mamuang 🥭🍚, with coconut cream. Fruit 🍍 🍌 🍉 is everywhere, often carved; durian, mangosteen and rambutan have no emoji.

To drink there is the orange Thai iced tea, cha yen 🧋, fresh coconut 🥥, and beer 🍺: the two big brands are Singha, named after the mythical lion, and Chang, which means elephant. Thais eat with a spoon in the right hand and a fork in the left to push food onto it 🥄, and use chopsticks 🥢 mainly for noodle soup.

Muay Thai emoji 🥊 and Thai sports

There is no Muay Thai emoji; people send 🥊 or 🥊🇹🇭. Muay Thai is called the art of eight limbs because it uses fists, elbows, knees and shins, and before every fight the boxers perform the wai khru ram muay, a slow dance that honours their teachers, to live music of pipe and drums. The big stadiums are Rajadamnern and Lumpinee in Bangkok.

Sepak takraw, kicking a woven ball over a net like volleyball played with the feet, head and knees, is a Thai specialty (🏐 is the nearest emoji), and football ⚽ is the most watched sport. Thailand's Olympic gold medals have come mostly from boxing, weightlifting 🏋️ and taekwondo 🥋, where Panipak Wongpattanakit won gold in 2020 and 2024; in badminton 🏸 Ratchanok Intanon became world champion at 18 in 2013 and Kunlavut Vitidsarn won the men's world title in 2023. In the windy weeks of spring, kite fighting 🪁 between the big star-shaped chula and the small pakpao kites is an old Thai sport.

Thailand travel emoji: Bangkok, the islands and the north 🛺🏝️

Bangkok 🏙️, Krung Thep to Thais, is skyscrapers, malls and markets 🛍️ such as the huge Chatuchak weekend market, a 7-Eleven 🏪 on what seems like every corner, and Wat Arun on the Chao Phraya river at sunset. People get around by tuk-tuk 🛺, by motorbike taxi 🛵, whose riders wear numbered orange vests, and above the traffic on the BTS Skytrain 🚈, open since 1999. On the water there are the long-tail boats 🚤 with a car engine on a long pole, and the small paddle boats 🛶 of floating markets such as Damnoen Saduak.

The south is the islands 🏝️ and beaches 🏖️ of the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand: Phuket, Krabi and the Phi Phi islands on one side, Ko Samui, Ko Phangan, with its full moon parties 🌕, and Ko Tao, one of the busiest places in the world to learn to dive 🤿, on the other, with coral reefs 🪸 and sea turtles 🐢. The north is mountains ⛰️ around Chiang Mai, where Doi Inthanon, at 2,565 m, is the highest point of the country; national parks 🏞️ such as Khao Yai protect forest across the country, and coconut palms 🌴 line the coasts.

Thai animals have their own stories. The macaques 🐒 of Lopburi live among the temple ruins in the town centre and get a fruit banquet every November; the water buffalo 🐃 was for centuries the partner of the rice farmer, and Chonburi still holds buffalo races; the Siamese cat 🐈 comes from here; tokay geckos and big monitor lizards 🦎 are part of everyday life; and the Siamese fighting fish 🐠, pla kat, was bred here for its fins and colours. Among the arts, khon 🎭, the masked dance drama of the Ramakien, and Thai massage, nuad Thai 💆, are on UNESCO's intangible heritage list, and classical Thai dance 💃 is known for its slow, curved hand gestures. The king 👑 is deeply respected, and his portrait hangs in homes, offices and along the roads.

Baht symbol ฿, Thai letters and where Thai is spoken

The baht symbol ฿ (U+0E3F, HTML ฿) stands for the Thai baht, divided into 100 satang. It is used before the amount in international prices, ฿100; in Thai the word usually follows the number instead, 100 บาท. To type it, copy it from here, add the Thai keyboard on a phone or computer, type 0E3F and press Alt+X in Microsoft Word on Windows, or on a Mac open the Character Viewer with Ctrl+Cmd+Space and search "baht".

The Thai alphabet has 44 consonants, from ก ko kai to ฮ ho nok huk, two of which, ฃ and ฅ, are no longer used. Each consonant is named after a word that starts with it, the way children learn them: ก ไก่ is "ko, chicken", ข ไข่ "kho, egg", ค ควาย "kho, buffalo". Vowels are written before, after, above or below the consonant, four tone marks combine with consonant class, syllable type and vowel length to indicate the syllable's tone, and words are written without spaces between them. The script grew out of Old Khmer and is traditionally credited to King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai in 1283; the letters here are the consonants, the marks ๆ and ฯ and the digits, and the full set with every vowel and tone mark is in the Thai collection.

ๆ, mai yamok, repeats the word before it: เด็กๆ, dek dek, means children in general. ฯ, paiyan noi, shortens a long name: กรุงเทพฯ, Krung Thep, stands for the full ceremonial name of Bangkok. The Thai digits ๐ ๑ ๒ ๓ ๔ ๕ ๖ ๗ ๘ ๙ still appear in official documents and formal writing, though everyday Thai uses 0–9, and years are often counted in the Buddhist Era, 543 years ahead, so 2026 is 2569.

Thailand has about 70 million people. Standard Thai, the language of Bangkok, school and television, has an estimated 56 million speakers in CLDR's language-population data; these estimates include first- and second-language speakers when possible. The same estimates put Northeastern Thai or Isan, close to Lao, at around 17 million, Northern Thai around 7 million and Southern Thai around 6 million. In the far south about 3.5 million speak Pattani Malay, and many of them are Muslim 🕌. English is widely learned, Chinese communities in Bangkok keep their festivals, and Khmer, Kuy, Mon, Hmong and Shan are spoken near the borders. See the Thai collection for the full alphabet, and Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar (Burma) for the neighbours.