Uruguay Emoji & Symbols

The Uruguay flag emoji 🇺🇾 shows nine horizontal stripes, five white and four light blue, with a golden Sol de Mayo, the Sun of May, on a white square in the top corner. The nine stripes stand for the nine departments the country had when its first constitution was sworn on 18 July 1830, the year the present design was set. Uruguayans call it el Pabellón Nacional, and the same sky blue gives the national football team its name, la Celeste.

Like every country flag, 🇺🇾 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇺 and 🇾, the country code UY. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there the same emoji shows as the letters UY. Copy it anyway: anyone reading on a phone will see the flag.

There is no emoji of the Sun of May itself. People use 🌞, the sun with a face, which is drawn much like it, or ☀️ for the plain sun. The sun with a face and rays, alternately straight and wavy, is the symbol of the May Revolution of 1810 in the Río de la Plata, and Uruguay shares it with Argentina, whose flag carries it too. Together with 🩵🤍 the sun spells the flag in colours: 🩵🤍🌞🤍🩵.

Uruguay national symbols: hearts, coat of arms and the peso sign $

The Uruguay heart emoji combo is 🩵🤍🩵, sky blue and white like the stripes, with 💛 for the sun. 🩵 light blue heart began reaching phones in late 2022, so for years people wrote 💙🤍💙 instead, and you will still see it. If a friend's phone shows an empty box where your 🩵 should be, their system is older; 💙 is the fallback that works everywhere.

The coat of arms is an oval shield in four quarters under a rising sun: golden scales ⚖️ for equality and justice, the Cerro de Montevideo ⛰️ with its fortress for strength, a horse 🐎 for liberty and an ox 🐂 for abundance, framed by olive and laurel branches. Those four emoji are a quick way to point at it, and the horse and the ox fit the country just as well, since cattle ranching built Uruguay.

The Uruguayan peso symbol is the ordinary dollar sign $, sometimes written $U to tell it apart, and the currency code is UYU. Prices are written $ 1.250 or $1.250,50, with a dot for thousands and a comma for decimals. Because the peso and the US dollar share the sign, Uruguayans write dollars as U$S or US$, and flats and cars are often priced in them. Today's peso uruguayo dates from 1993, when it replaced the nuevo peso at a thousand to one.

Football emoji for Uruguay: ⚽ 🏆 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 💪

Uruguay won the Olympic football tournaments of 1924 and 1928 🥇, then hosted and won the very first World Cup in 1930, beating Argentina 4–2 in Montevideo's Estadio Centenario 🏟️, built for the tournament and named for the constitution's hundredth anniversary. In 1950 it won again, beating Brazil 2–1 in Rio's Maracanã in front of a stadium that expected a home party; Brazilians still call it the Maracanazo. Uruguay counts all four titles, which is why the shirt carries four stars and fans paste 🏆⭐⭐⭐⭐. Add fifteen Copa América titles and you see why ⚽ follows 🇺🇾 in nearly every Uruguay emoji message.

💪 stands for the garra charrúa, the never-give-up fighting spirit Uruguayans claim for their teams, named after the Charrúa people who lived in the land before the Spanish. Club football has its own colours: Peñarol fans write 💛🖤, yellow and black, and Nacional fans 🤍💙❤️, the white, blue and red of the Tricolor. Their derby, the clásico, splits Montevideo in two.

Beyond football, 🏉 is for Los Teros, the national rugby team, named after the southern lapwing, and 🏀 for basketball, followed with a passion second only to football. 🏄 is for the surf beaches of La Paloma and Punta del Este.

Mate, asado and chivito: the food of Uruguay in emoji

🧉 the mate emoji shows the gourd with its metal straw, the bombilla, for yerba mate, and in Uruguay it is everywhere: on buses, in offices, on the Rambla, with a thermos of hot water tucked under the arm. Uruguayans drink more yerba mate per person than any other country, although almost all of it is grown in Brazil. 🥐 stands for the bizcochos from the bakery that go with it, and 🫓🌧️ for tortas fritas, the fried dough that, by custom, families make on rainy days.

The weekend asado is 🥩🍖🔥: beef ribs and cuts slow-cooked over wood embers on the parrilla, with 🌭 for the choripán. The national sandwich is the chivito, a thin beef steak piled with ham, mozzarella, a fried egg, lettuce and tomato: 🥪🥩🍳🧀. 🥟 is the nearest emoji to the empanada, and 🍕 stands for pizza, often eaten with fainá, a chickpea flatbread laid on top, a habit Italian immigrants brought to the Río de la Plata.

For dessert, 🍮 is flan with dulce de leche, 🍪 stands in for alfajores, and 🍦 for the ice cream shops of every neighbourhood. 🍷🍇 is the wine, above all Tannat, the dark red grape that has become Uruguay's signature, and 🥃 is grappamiel, grappa sweetened with honey, sipped on cold nights.

Candombe, carnival, tango and gauchos: 🥁 🎭 💃 🤠

🥁🪘 are for candombe, the Afro-Uruguayan drumming born among the descendants of enslaved Africans in Montevideo. Lines of drummers, each playing a chico, repique or piano drum slung from the shoulder and struck with one hand and one stick, march through the Sur and Palermo neighbourhoods on Sunday afternoons, and in February in the great parade of Las Llamadas. UNESCO added candombe to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2009.

Uruguay's carnival 🎭🎉🎊 is often called the longest in the world, running for about forty days across January to March. Its heart is the murga, choirs in painted faces and patchwork costumes who sing satirical songs about the year's news on neighbourhood stages called tablados.

Tango 💃🕺🪗🌹 belongs to both banks of the Río de la Plata. La Cumparsita, perhaps the best-known tango ever written, was composed in Montevideo by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez, and UNESCO listed tango as heritage of Uruguay and Argentina together in 2009. 🪗 is the closest emoji to the bandoneón, the concertina with buttons that gives tango its sound.

Out in the countryside, 🤠🐎 is the gaucho, the horseman of the cattle ranches, who shows his riding every Holy Week at the Semana Criolla rodeo 🏇 in Montevideo's Prado. 🐄🐑🧶 are the cattle and the wool that ranching lives on, 🎸 the payadores who improvise verses to a guitar, 🌾 the farmland and 🌳 the lone ombú tree of the plains. 📚 is for the country's writers, among them Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Benedetti and Eduardo Galeano.

Spanish letters in Uruguay: ñ, á, ¿ and how to type them

Uruguay's language is Spanish, spoken by roughly 3.4 million of its about 3.5 million people (estimates). It writes the same letters as all Spanish: á é í ó ú mark the stressed syllable, as in Paysandú, Tacuarembó and Río Negro, ü makes the u sound in güe and güi (pingüino), and ñ is a letter of its own, as in Peñarol and año. Questions and exclamations open with ¿ and ¡. Uruguayan Spanish uses vos in most of the country, with its own accented verb forms: vos tenés, sabés, querés.

On Windows hold Alt and type on the number pad 0225 for á, 0233 é, 0237 í, 0243 ó, 0250 ú, 0252 ü, 0241 ñ, 0209 Ñ, 0191 ¿ and 0161 ¡. On a Mac press Option + E then the vowel for an acute accent, Option + N then n for ñ, Option + U then u for ü, Option + Shift + ? for ¿ and Option + 1 for ¡. On a phone, long-press the letter. The full set, with the rules, is in our Spanish letters collection.

Along the border with Brazil, in towns such as Rivera and Artigas, many people also speak a local Portuguese; see our Portuguese letters collection. For the neighbours, see the Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay collections.