What 0️⃣ means
It means zero, dressed up as a keypad button. Before a noun, as in “0️⃣ chances” or “0️⃣ effort,” it stresses a complete lack. If someone sends it to you, the question it answers tells you what they are counting.
Why does 0️⃣ sometimes show as a plain 0?
It is three characters, and one can go missing. The emoji is the ordinary digit 0, an invisible variation selector that asks for emoji style, and a combining enclosing keycap, a mark that draws the button around the digit. If an app strips a part, or a font lacks the sequence, you may see a bare 0, a 0 beside an empty box, or another fallback. Your editor may still select or delete the whole button as one unit.
The keycap digits came from the emoji sets of Japanese mobile carriers, where keypad-style numbers matched the phone's own keys and marked menu choices on screen. The keycap set entered Unicode emoji in 2010, when those carrier sets were absorbed.
Casual and visually emphatic; use a plain digit in formal writing.
What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsDon't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Worth knowing
- The characters behind 0️⃣ existed in Unicode 8 years before anyone was allowed to draw them in colour: Unicode 3.2 in 2002, emoji presentation in 2010.
- 0️⃣ is not one character. It is 3 of them glued together, which is why deleting it sometimes takes two presses of backspace and why it breaks character counters.
Questions people ask
1How do I write 20 or 100 with keycap emoji?
Put them in a row. 2️⃣0️⃣ reads as twenty and 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ as a hundred; within the keycap set only ten has its own single emoji, 🔟.
How to type 0️⃣
:zero:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.0️⃣Codes and encoding3 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.