What 🇵🇼 means
It means Palau, the country, or a tie to it. People drop it next to a location tag, a holiday album, a sports result, or their name in a profile to say "this is Palau" or "I'm Palauan". There is no slang reading: the flag says exactly what it shows, and the words around it decide whether that is a trip, home, news or support for a team.
The flag itself is easy to read once you know it. The blue is the Pacific Ocean that surrounds the islands, and the golden disc is the full moon, which Palauans traditionally treat as the best time for fishing, planting, harvesting and celebrations. The moon sits a little toward the flagpole side, not in the dead centre. Palau adopted the flag on 1 January 1981, when it became a self-governing republic, and kept it at full independence in 1994.
Where is Palau, and why would someone send its flag?
Palau is a Pacific island country east of the Philippines, famous for diving. It is part of Micronesia, has fewer than 20,000 people, and is made up of a few hundred islands, most of them uninhabited. Its official languages are Palauan and English. The capital is Ngerulmud, though nearly everyone lives in or near the town of Koror.
Most people who are not Palauan meet this flag in travel content. Palau's Rock Islands, a cluster of green limestone domes rising out of turquoise lagoons, are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and its reefs and the lake full of harmless jellyfish draw divers and snorkellers from around the world. So 🇵🇼 next to an underwater photo usually means "I went there" or "it's on my list". Palauans at home and abroad (many live in Guam, Hawaii and the US mainland, with which Palau has close ties) use it the way anyone uses their own flag: pride, homesickness, and cheering on Palau at the Olympics or the Pacific Games.
Neutral and literal, as warm or formal as the message around it; it never carries a joke or an insult on its own.
The disc is a moon. Calling it a sun, or calling the flag "Japan in blue", mildly annoys Palauans.
What it means when someone sends it to you
4 readingsDon't confuse it with
3Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- Since 2017 every visitor has the Palau Pledge stamped into their passport on arrival and signs it: a promise, written with the country's children, to tread lightly on the islands.
- The flag is often described as Japan's with the colours changed, but Palau's disc is a full moon, and it is deliberately set off centre toward the pole.
Questions people ask
3Why does 🇵🇼 show as the letters PW?
Because you are on Windows or an app without flag pictures. The emoji is really two letter codes, P and W, and systems without flag artwork just print them. The meaning is still Palau, and recipients on phones see the flag.
Is the circle on the Palau flag a sun or a moon?
A moon. Palau says it stands for the full moon, the traditional best time for fishing, planting and celebrating. The blue around it is the Pacific.
Is Palau its own country?
Yes. It has been fully independent since 1994, with its own seat at the United Nations, while keeping a close partnership with the United States for defence and funding.
How to type 🇵🇼
:flag-pw:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.🇵🇼Codes and encoding2 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.