Eggplant

Usually a penis, unless food is clearly the topic. The long purple shape did the work: in flirting and jokes, 🍆 stands in for male anatomy, while the literal vegetable lives on in recipes, grocery lists and cooking posts. British English calls the vegetable an aubergine and Indian English a brinjal.

It started as an ordinary food picture. A 2009 Unicode proposal lists it among emoji already used by Japanese mobile carriers, gathered so phones on different networks could exchange them. In Japan the eggplant, nasu, is a common vegetable with a lucky side: an old saying ranks the most auspicious first dreams of the new year as Mount Fuji, a hawk and an eggplant. The sexual reading came later: the language journal American Speech cites a Twitter example from 2011.

What does it mean when someone sends you 🍆?

Read the words around it before you reply. With nothing else to go on, most readers take a bare 🍆 sexually; whether it's flirting or a joke depends on how you two already talk.

A 2019 linguistics experiment with English-language messages found the same pattern: with no food lead-in, readers took 🍆 sexually by default; a grocery question lowered that reading but left people divided, and a trailing 😉 pushed it back up. Older and less emoji-savvy participants rated it less sexual, so a relative's 🍆 may well be about food.