UK Emoji

🇬🇧 is not a picture stored in Unicode but two letters, the regional indicators 🇬 and 🇧: GB is the United Kingdom's ISO country code, which is why the flag is officially called "Flag: United Kingdom" but types as GB. There is no 🇺🇰; U and K side by side stay two letters. The Union Jack (also correctly called the Union Flag) was among the first ten flags ever encoded, the ones Japanese phone carriers already had, which became standard emoji in 2010. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there 🇬🇧 shows as the letters GB; the recipient sees a flag only if their device renders the GB sequence as a flag.

England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 and Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 followed in 2017, and they work differently: each is a black flag 🏴 followed by invisible tag characters that spell gbeng, gbsct or gbwls. They are the only flags of a part of a country that phones are recommended to support, so an app that does not know the tags shows a plain black flag. The current Union Flag combines the red cross of St George for England, the white saltire of St Andrew on blue for Scotland and the red saltire of St Patrick for Ireland; St Patrick's saltire was added in 1801, after the first Union Flag combined only St George's cross and St Andrew's saltire in 1606. Wales, already joined to England when the first union flag was made in 1606, is not in it, which is why the red dragon of 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 matters so much to the Welsh.

Northern Ireland has no official flag of its own since 1972 and no emoji; people there use 🇬🇧, ☘️ or the Irish flag 🇮🇪, depending on who they are, so it is worth choosing with care. Where flags don't show, the colours do: ❤️🤍💙 or 🟥⬜🟦. The Channel Islands 🇯🇪 🇬🇬 🇨🇶 and the Isle of Man 🇮🇲 are Crown dependencies, outside the UK but under the Crown, and fourteen overseas territories from Gibraltar 🇬🇮 and Bermuda 🇧🇲 to the Falklands 🇫🇰 and Pitcairn 🇵🇳 are British too, most with their own flag emoji; you will find them at the end of the grid.

UK emoji and what they mean

Each nation has its emblem. England's is the red rose 🌹 and the lion 🦁: three lions are on the royal arms and on the England football shirt. Scotland's national animal is the unicorn 🦄, chained on the Scottish royal arms, and its cross is the saltire ☓. Wales has Y Ddraig Goch, the red dragon 🐉, and the daffodil, for which people use 🌼 because there is no daffodil emoji (nor a leek or a thistle one). The harp 🪉 is the national instrument of Wales, and the shamrock ☘️ belongs to Northern Ireland and St Patrick.

London has no Big Ben emoji, so people send 🕰️; strictly Big Ben is the great bell, and the tower has been called the Elizabeth Tower since 2012. 🎡 is the London Eye, 🌉 Tower Bridge, 🚇 the Tube, 🚕 a black cab and 🚌 the bus, although no emoji draws a double-decker. ☎️ and 📮 are the red telephone box and pillar box. 💂 is drawn on most phones as the King's Guard outside Buckingham Palace in a tall bearskin hat, 👑 🤴 👸 are for the royal family, and 🐦‍⬛ for the ravens of the Tower of London: legend says the kingdom will fall if they ever leave, so at least six are always kept.

The weather gets emoji of its own, ☔🌧️🌫️, and so does the countryside: 🐑 for the hills of Wales, the Lake District and the Highlands, 🦌 the red deer, 🦔 the hedgehog, 🦡 the badger, 🦊 the urban fox. 🦢 is a royal bird: unmarked mute swans on open water belong to the Crown, and they are counted every July on the Thames at Swan Upping. 🐝 is Manchester's worker bee, a symbol of the city's industrial past that became a sign of togetherness after the Arena attack in 2017.

British food and drink emoji

Tea comes first: 🫖☕ and a 🍪 to dunk, or 🫖🥪🍰 for an afternoon tea of sandwiches and cake. The sandwich 🥪 is named after the 4th Earl of Sandwich. A full English breakfast is 🍳🥓🫘🍞, bacon, a fried egg, baked beans and toast, often with ☕.

Fish and chips is 🐟🍟; note that in Britain 🍟 are chips, and chips in the American sense are crisps. 🥧 is a pie, a mince pie at Christmas, and 🥟 is the usual stand-in for a Cornish pasty. 🍛 stands for the curry house, a British institution, and 🍽️ for the Sunday roast, which has no emoji of its own. 🍮 is for custard and puddings, 🥞 for Pancake Day and 🍓 for strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. 🍺🍻 is a pint at the pub and 🥃 a dram of Scotch whisky, which by law must be made and matured in Scotland.

UK holidays, culture and the emoji people send

Every nation has a saint's day: St David's Day for Wales on 1 March 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🌼, St Patrick's Day on 17 March ☘️, a bank holiday in Northern Ireland, St George's Day for England on 23 April 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🌹, and St Andrew's Day for Scotland on 30 November 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, a bank holiday in Scotland. Scotland also has Burns Night on 25 January, the poet Robert Burns's birthday, with haggis and whisky 🥃, and Hogmanay on New Year's Eve, sung out with his Auld Lang Syne 🎆.

On 5 November, Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night, Britain remembers the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605 to blow up Parliament with bonfires and fireworks: 🔥🎆. Shrove Tuesday is Pancake Day 🥞. Christmas is 🎄🎅 with Father Christmas, mince pies 🥧 and the King's speech on the 25th, and the 26th is Boxing Day 🎁. Big royal occasions, such as a coronation or a jubilee, bring out street parties under Union Jack bunting: 🇬🇧👑🎉.

British culture has its emoji too: 🎭 for Shakespeare and the West End, 🎸 for the bands from the Beatles on, 🕵️ for Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street and 🧙 for Harry Potter, whose Hogwarts Express crosses the Glenfinnan Viaduct in the Scottish Highlands in the films.

Sport: football, rugby, cricket and Wimbledon

Britain wrote the modern rules of many sports. The Football Association was founded in London in 1863, and England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 and Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 played the first international match in 1872. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have their own team, which is why fans send their nation's flag with ⚽ rather than 🇬🇧; 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿⚽🦁 is for the Three Lions, world champions in 1966. Rugby 🏉 is named after Rugby School, and the Six Nations sets England, Scotland and Wales against Ireland, France and Italy every spring.

🏏⚱️ is the Ashes, the England–Australia series named after an 1882 mock obituary; a small urn presented to England captain Ivo Bligh on the 1882–83 tour became its symbol, but the original urn is not the trophy. 🎾🍓 is Wimbledon, the oldest tennis tournament in the world, first played in 1877. ⛳ is golf, whose home is St Andrews in Scotland, 🥌 curling, another Scottish invention, 🚣 the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race on the Thames, 🏇 the Grand National at Aintree, and 🏎️ Silverstone, which held the first Formula One world championship race in 1950. 🎯 and 🎱 stand for darts and snooker, the pub sports, 🥊 for boxing and 🏟️ for Wembley, the home of English football.

The pound sign £ and the letters of Welsh and Gaelic

The UK pays in pounds sterling, written £ before the number: £5, £9.99. The sign is an L for libra, the Roman pound weight, the same root as lb ℔. Until 15 February 1971 a pound was 20 shillings of 12 pence each; since then it is 100 pence, written 50p. On a UK keyboard £ is Shift+3, which is where Americans have #, and that causes a classic confusion: in the US "pound sign" means #, which the British call the hash. On Windows type Alt+0163, on a US Mac Option+3, on a phone long-press $ on the symbols keyboard; in HTML it is £. ₤ with two bars is a separate character, encoded as the lira sign, and Unicode recommends £ for the pound.

Welsh writes letters beyond A–Z. About 890,000 people speak Welsh in the UK (a CLDR estimate), and it marks long vowels with the circumflex, the to bach (little roof), on all seven of its vowels including w and y: tŷ (house), dŵr (water), tân (fire) as against tan (until). Ŵ ŵ Ŷ ŷ are rare outside Welsh, so many keyboards lack them: use the Welsh keyboard on a phone or Mac, the UK Extended layout on Windows (AltGr+6, then the letter), or the HTML entities ŵ and ŷ. Welsh also uses acute, grave and diaeresis marks less often; our Welsh collection has the full alphabet.

Scottish Gaelic, spoken mostly in the Highlands and Islands, uses only the grave accent: à è ì ò ù, as in fàilte (welcome) and slàinte (health), while Irish, spoken in Northern Ireland too, writes the same words with an acute: fáilte, sláinte. Scots, which CLDR estimates at about 1.7 million speakers, needs no special letters at all. Of the UK's roughly 68 million people (a CLDR estimate) nearly all speak English, and big communities also speak Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil and Gujarati; see our English, Welsh, Irish, Scots, Polish and Punjabi collections for their alphabets.