What 🦻 means
An ear with a device that helps someone hear. A hearing aid makes sounds easier to hear. The emoji can refer to the device itself, being hard of hearing, or deafness more broadly. Not every deaf or hard-of-hearing person uses a hearing aid.
The skin-tone versions carry the same meaning. They change the appearance of the ear, not the kind of device or degree of hearing loss.
What does it mean in a message?
The surrounding words tell you what the sender means. Beside news of a new hearing aid, it points to the device. Next to a request for captions or written information, a sender can use it to flag an access need. It can also express support for someone with hearing loss.
On its own, it doesn't establish someone's identity, hearing ability or equipment.
Usually matter-of-fact when you talk about your own hearing or accessibility; more personal when used to describe someone else, so mind the context.
Sent as a jab because someone didn't hear you, it can read as mockery of their hearing.
Part of collections
Don't confuse it with
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Related characters
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Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- Apple proposed the emoji in 2018 with input from disability organizations, including the National Association of the Deaf, a US organization representing deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
- A 2018 comment from a European association of hearing-aid makers called the pictured aid old-fashioned. The design also needed to remain recognizable at tiny emoji size, so it needn't resemble someone's actual device.
Questions people ask
1Is 🦻 a cochlear implant?
No. It depicts a hearing aid. A cochlear implant is a different kind of hearing device. The emoji can refer broadly to hearing loss, so don't infer the sender's equipment from it.
More like this
14
Collections with 🦻
3
How to type or find 🦻
- Also called
- hearing aid emoji
- Search it as
- hearing aid · hard of hearing · hoh · deaf · hearing loss · cochlear implant
- Type it as
- :ear_with_hearing_aid:
- Around since
- 2019 · Emoji 12.0
- Shows up on
- Every phone · iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux
:ear_with_hearing_aid:Common shortcode in Slack, GitHub, Discord, Mattermost and other chat apps; a few apps use a different name.🦻Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.