What 🗨️ means
Medieval European art used banderoles — ribbon-like painted scrolls — to name figures or carry their words. Drawn speech balloons appeared in British satirical prints around 1800, in U.S. comic strips in the 1890s and in French-language comics from 1925. The emoji inherits that job: showing whose words these are.
Don't confuse it with
2Worth knowing
- In October 2015, Unicode recorded that at least one major platform already offered 🗨️ on its emoji keyboard.
Questions people ask
1Why does 🗨️ look different on other phones?
Every platform draws its own artwork for the same code point. The character you send is identical; Apple, Google, Samsung and WhatsApp each render it in their own style.
How to type 🗨️
Windows
Win+.Open the emoji picker and search “left speech bubble”.
macOS
Control+Command+Spaceopens the character viewer.
iOS / Android
Emoji keyboard → search “left speech bubble”.
Chat apps
:left_speech_bubble:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.HTML
🗨️Codes and encoding2 code points
HTML decimal
🗨️
HTML hex
🗨️
CSS content
content: "\1F5E8\FE0F";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%97%A8%EF%B8%8F
1
On screen
2
Code points
3
JS .length
7
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.