What 👪 means
Use 👪 when the idea matters, not the lineup. The customisable family emoji are built by joining separate person emoji with an invisible joiner character, so each one spells out how many adults and children are pictured: two adults and a child, one adult and two children, and so on. 👪 is one fixed picture with no parts to swap. It suits family in general, and it is the safer pick when the other person's phone might not support a joined sequence: an app that does not recognise one may show the separate person emoji side by side instead.
It began as a Japanese phone emoji. A 2009 proposal to add emoji to Unicode, the shared text standard, matched 👪 to the family pictograms of Japanese mobile carriers such as DoCoMo, labelled 家族 ("family"). That is why it exists as a single character, while the mix-and-match families are later sequences.
What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsDon't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- 👪 is a single code point, so it survives copying through almost anything — old databases, SMS gateways, printer drivers.
Questions people ask
2Why is the family emoji gray on iPhone?
Because of Apple's artwork. In iOS 17.4, March 2024, Apple redrew family emoji as white silhouettes on gray, following Unicode's 2022 advice to keep family designs generic. The meaning is unchanged.
Does 👪 show a mother, father and child?
Not necessarily. Some earlier artwork showed a man, a woman and a child, but vendors draw it differently, with varying numbers of people. The character itself only means "family".
How to type 👪
:family:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.👪Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.