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😨

fearful face

Fearful Face

😨 is the scared face: wide eyes, open mouth, one cold sweat drop — pure oh-no energy. People send it for nervous jitters before something stressful and as a yikes at alarming news. It also doubles as exaggerated secondhand cringe, which is why it gets mixed up with the screaming 😱.

EmojiSince 2010
Also called
scared face
Search it as
fear · scared · anxious · dread · nervous · oh no · yikes · worried
Type it as
:fearful:
Around since
2010 · Emoji 0.6
Shows up on
Every phone · iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux

What 😨 means

😨 is quiet dread; 😱 is a full scream. 😨 keeps its hands down and its mouth in a tense oval — scared and sweaty, watching the bad thing happen. 😱 throws both hands to its cheeks and stretches the mouth wide, horror-movie style. Pick 😨 for unease and nerves you can still function through; save 😱 for shock that knocks the wind out of you.

What does it mean when someone sends you 😨?

They're flagging worry, not describing terror. Aimed at your plan, it usually means hesitation — a softer 'are you sure about this?' than typing it out. Aimed at someone else's disaster story, the same face flips into theatrical cringe, more 'yikes, that's rough' than real fright. Read it against the message it answers; on its own, the stakes are anyone's guess.

Reads as nervous, not weak — fine in casual and semi-professional chats, rare in formal writing.

Replying with 😨 to someone's exciting news can read as doubt, not shared excitement.

What it means when someone sends it to you

4 readings
Replying alone to someone's plan
Real hesitation — a softer way of asking 'are you sure?'
Attached to your own upcoming event
Self-directed nerves — anxious about it, not literally terrified.
Reacting to someone else's embarrassing story
Exaggerated secondhand cringe played for laughs, not fear.
Sent solo with no other text
Ambiguous — genuine worry or deadpan joke; check the thread's tone.

Don't confuse it with

4
😱
Face Screaming In Fear
Hands on cheeks, mouth stretched wide — a full scream, past 😨's quiet dread.
😰
Anxious Face With Sweat
Sweaty brow, small worried mouth — grinding stress or a looming deadline, not sudden fright.
😧
Anguished Face
Wide eyes, open mouth, no sweat — stunned by bad news rather than sweating it.
😯
Hushed Face
Small round mouth, no sweat drop — plain surprise; easy to confuse at tiny sizes.

Combination ideas

3
Extra-sweaty nerves — deadline panic or pre-interview jitters.
Dreading it but watching anyway — you can't look away from the mess.
Nervous laugh sliding into real worry.

Worth knowing

  • 😨 comes from Japanese mobile-phone emoji, matching picture characters of the carriers KDDI and SoftBank. A 2009 proposal listed it apart from the scream face 😱; both entered Unicode 6.0 in 2010.

Questions people ask

2

Is it rude to send someone 😨?

No. It reads as concern, not an insult. Just watch where it lands — under someone's good news, it can look like doubt rather than shared nerves.

Can 😨 mean nervous-excited, not just scared?

Yes. It covers jitters with an upside — first dates, flights, interviews, countdowns — dread plus buzz, not pure terror.

How to type 😨

Windows
Win+.Open the emoji picker and search “fearful face”.
macOS
Control+Command+Spaceopens the character viewer.
iOS / Android
Emoji keyboard → search “fearful face”.
Chat apps
:fearful:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.
HTML
😨
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
😨
HTML hex
😨
CSS content
content: "\1F628";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%98%A8
1
On screen
1
Code points
2
JS .length
4
UTF-8 bytes

A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

Families this belongs to

1

Feelings & reactions120 symbols

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