Sword, Gun & Weapon Emoji

⚔️ Crossed swords is the sword emoji most people mean. Two blades crossed is the old sign for a battle on a map, and in chat it means a fight, a duel, a rivalry or a versus match: Team A ⚔️ Team B. It is the standard PvP marker in gaming servers and the usual way to announce a tournament. The character is older than emoji: Unicode added ⚔ in 2005 as a plain map symbol, and phones gave it a colour picture in 2015.

🗡️ Dagger is the single-sword emoji. It is the one to use for a knight, a rogue, an assassin, a backstab ("🗡️ in the back") or anything medieval and fantasy, and it is the sword that gamers and anime fans put in usernames. 🔪 Kitchen knife looks like a cleaver and reads very differently: either cooking, or a joke threat ("touch my fries 🔪"), or horror when it stands next to 🩸. Its formal Unicode name is HOCHO, the Japanese word for a kitchen knife, because it arrived with the Japanese phone emoji in 2010.

🪓 Axe (2019) is a hatchet: lumberjack, Viking, fire axe or a battle axe depending on company. 🔨 hammer, ⛏️ pick and ⚒️ hammer and pick are tools, but in Minecraft talk they are weapons and loadout items, so a line like ⛏️⚔️🏹🛡️ is read at once as "my kit". For the people who hold the blades there are 🤺 person fencing and 🥷 ninja.

Gun emoji 🔫: why it is a water pistol, and the rifle that never became an emoji

🔫 was drawn as a real revolver or pistol on every phone until 2016, when Apple replaced it with a green water gun in iOS 10. Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Twitter and Facebook followed over the next two years, so today the gun emoji is a toy squirt gun almost everywhere, and the name on emoji keyboards is water pistol. The formal character name is still PISTOL, and very old devices or fonts may still show a weapon, which is worth remembering before you send one as a joke.

There is no rifle emoji, and that is on purpose. A rifle (🥆) and a modern pentathlon sign were on the list for Unicode 9.0 in 2016, but Apple asked for the rifle to be dropped and the committee removed both from the emoji set. They were still encoded as plain black-and-white symbols, so 🥆 exists as text and appears on this page, but no emoji keyboard offers it and many fonts leave it blank. If you need a gun for a game profile, the text guns below are what people actually use.

Text guns and text swords: ︻デ═一 piece by piece

The classic text gun ︻デ═一 is built from four unrelated characters that happen to line up: ︻, a Japanese bracket turned for vertical writing, as the grip; デ, the katakana syllable de, as the sight and body; ═, a double box-drawing line, as the barrel; and 一, the Chinese character for "one", as the muzzle. Swap the body for a box-drawing tee and you get the rifle ︻╦╤─; add a half block as a stock and a second tee and you get the sniper ▄︻┻┳═一. Reverse the order with the mirrored bracket ︼ or the heavy-left line ╾ and the gun points the other way: ╾━╤デ╦︻.

The best-known text sword, ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ, works the same way: a black rectangle ▬ for the pommel, the Greek letter iota ι for the guard, the double line for the blade and the Arabic letter hah in its medial form ﺤ for the tip. All of these pieces are in the grid, so you can rebuild or lengthen a weapon yourself. Because they are ordinary text, they survive in usernames, Discord channel names and game chats where emoji are blocked, although the look depends on the font: on a few systems the Arabic tip or the katakana sits slightly higher than the rest.

Bows, shields, bombs and fists: the rest of the arsenal

🏹 Bow and arrow (2015) covers archery, hunting, The Hunger Games and the zodiac sign Sagittarius; next to a heart it becomes Cupid's bow and a crush. 🎯 bullseye is the target it aims at, and in chat means "exactly" or "nailed it". 🪃 boomerang (2020) is the thing that comes back, karma or a comeback. 🔱 trident is Poseidon's and Shiva's spear, the emblem of Ukraine and Barbados, and a fork for anything from Aquaman to a pitchfork. For arrows that look like real feathered shafts there are the dingbats ➳ ➵ ➸ ➶ ➹ ➴ ➷ and the barbed ➺ ➻ ➼ ➽, favourites in aesthetic usernames.

🛡️ Shield is defence, protection, security and the tank role in a party; 🪖 military helmet (2020) is the soldier's kit, and the text symbol ⛨ is a heraldic shield with a cross for coats of arms and knightly names. 💣 bomb and 🧨 firecracker both have a lit fuse, but the firecracker is the one with a dynamite shape, so people use it for TNT; 💥 collision is the bang itself. For fighting without weapons there are 👊 fist, 🥊 boxing glove, 🥋 martial arts uniform, 🤼 wrestlers and the newest of them all, the cartoon 🫯 fight cloud from Unicode 17 in 2025. ☠️ skull and crossbones and the 🏴‍☠️ pirate flag mark poison, pirates and danger; 🩸 drop of blood is the aftermath.

Weapon symbols in kanji and typography: 剣 刀 † ⸸

If you want a sword as a single character rather than a picture, the Chinese and Japanese characters do it: 剣 ken, sword (the Japanese form; Chinese writes 剑 or 劍), 刀 katana or tō, a single-edged blade or knife, 弓 yumi, bow, 矛 hoko, spear, 斧 ono, axe, 盾 tate, shield, 銃 jū, gun, and 武 bu, martial, the first character of bushidō and budō. They are popular in gamer tags and tattoos; check a reading with a speaker before you ink one.

The typographic † dagger and ‡ double dagger are footnote marks that happen to look like swords, which is why they fill goth, metal and fantasy usernames; ⸸ turned dagger is the inverted version, and ⸶ ⸷ ⹋ are rarer guarded and triple daggers from the same family. 🕱 is the black skull and crossbones from the old Wingdings font, a text-colour alternative to ☠️. Because these are plain text they stay the colour of your username and never turn into a cartoon.