What 🇳🇵 means
It copies Nepal's real, non-rectangular flag. Nepal's national flag is two stacked crimson pennants with a blue border — the only national flag that isn't a rectangle. The jagged outline still just means Nepal.
Unicode's emoji report (UTR #51) notes Nepal's flag is over 20% taller than wide, so apps may pad or squeeze it to line up with other flags.
Don't confuse it with
1Worth knowing
- The characters behind 🇳🇵 existed in Unicode 5 years before anyone was allowed to draw them in colour: Unicode 6.0 in 2010, emoji presentation in 2015.
- 🇳🇵 is not one character. It is 2 of them glued together, which is why deleting it sometimes takes two presses of backspace and why it breaks character counters.
Questions people ask
1Why does it show as letters?
Missing support. The emoji is two regional indicator letters, N and P; systems without flag support show those letters or a missing-flag box instead.
How to type 🇳🇵
Windows
Win+.Open the emoji picker and search “flag: Nepal”.
macOS
Control+Command+Spaceopens the character viewer.
iOS / Android
Emoji keyboard → search “flag”.
Chat apps
:flag-np:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.HTML
🇳🇵Codes and encoding2 code points
HTML decimal
🇳🇵
HTML hex
🇳🇵
CSS content
content: "\1F1F3\1F1F5";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%87%B3%F0%9F%87%B5
1
On screen
2
Code points
4
JS .length
8
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.