Keycap: 10

A “10” printed on a rounded square key. It belongs to the keycap set, the emoji that look like buttons on a phone keypad: 0️⃣ to 9️⃣, #️⃣ and *️⃣. The ten is the odd one out, because a standard phone keypad has no ten key; it was carried over from the Japanese phone emoji that the first emoji batch was built from.

Typing 1 and 0 will not give you 🔟. Each single-digit keycap is an ordinary digit followed by invisible marks that say “draw a key around this”, and you pick it from the emoji keyboard; ten has no such recipe and lives as one separate character.

What does it mean when someone sends 🔟?

Often 10 out of 10: perfect, no complaints. Dropped under a photo, a meal, an outfit or a song, it is the highest mark a friend can give, sometimes written “🔟/🔟”. It is warm and emphatic, rarely ironic unless the words around it are.

In other spots it is simply a number: the tenth point in a list, “top 🔟”, “🔟 days to go” or the first beat of a countdown. The words around it tell you which: praise before it means a rating, a list or “days to go” means a count.