Jack-O-Lantern

A carved, candle-lit pumpkin, the friendly face of Halloween. Halloween falls on 31 October, the evening before All Saints' Day. It grew out of the old Irish and Scottish festival of Samhain, which marked the end of harvest and a night when the dead were thought to walk, and later took its name from the Christian All Hallows' Eve. In the United States and Canada, and increasingly everywhere, it is a night when children dress up and go door to door asking "trick or treat?" for sweets, adults throw costume parties, and houses are decorated with cobwebs, skeletons, ghosts and carved pumpkins.

The jack-o'-lantern is the centrepiece. In the last weeks of October families buy a pumpkin, scoop out the flesh and seeds, cut eyes, a nose and a jagged grin into the shell and put a candle inside, then set it on the doorstep or a windowsill so the face glows after dark. The grin can be goofy or menacing; both count. The emoji shows exactly that: an orange pumpkin with a lit, carved face.

What does 🎃 mean when someone sends it?

Halloween is here, or coming, and they're in the mood. The commonest uses are a greeting ("Happy Halloween 🎃"), plans ("costume party Saturday 🎃"), captions on costume photos and on children's trick-or-treating hauls. From the first days of October many people treat the whole month as "spooky season" and add 🎃 to their display names and bios, so a pumpkin in a username means they're into the holiday, nothing more.

It also does loose autumn duty: pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, pumpkin-spice drinks and golden leaves all get a 🎃, because there is no plain pumpkin emoji. On its own it carries no menace at all; the grin is the joke. Paired with 💀, 🔪 or 🩸 it leans towards horror films, still in fun.

In countries where Halloween arrived more recently, such as Japan, Korea and much of Europe, it is mostly an adult costume night and a themed-party season rather than a children's door-to-door tradition, and 🎃 reads accordingly: dressing up, decorations, themed menus.

Before pumpkins, the lanterns were turnips

In Ireland and Scotland, people hollowed out turnips at Halloween, carved faces into them and set a candle inside; Scots speakers call the turnip a "tumshie". Irish and Scottish emigrants carried the custom to North America in the 1800s, where the native pumpkin was bigger and far easier to carve, and the pumpkin lantern became the standard.

The name comes from "Jack-with-the-lantern", a 17th-century English nickname for a night watchman and for the will-o'-the-wisp, the eerie lights seen over marshes. Irish folklore adds Stingy Jack, a trickster barred from both heaven and hell, said to wander the earth with an ember in a hollow turnip.