Muted speaker

**Usually “no sound here”; aimed at a person, “be quiet.”

Most of the time 🔇 is a plain status report. Posted with a video it warns “no audio” or “watch on mute”; paired with its opposite 🔊 it labels the two states (“sound on 🔊 / sound off 🔇”). With a phone it means “I’m on silent, text me”; with a meeting or a library it means the place is quiet.

The second big use comes from social media, where muting a person, group or thread means you stop seeing their posts or getting their notifications without blocking them. “That group chat is 🔇 until the weekend” or “muted him 🔇” uses the emoji as shorthand for that button. It is milder than blocking, but telling someone they are muted still stings.

Pointed at a person rather than a device, 🔇 becomes a request or an order: a gentle “keep it down, the baby’s asleep” when the words around it are friendly, a cold “stop talking” when it arrives alone in a tense exchange. The emoji itself is neutral; the tone comes entirely from where it lands.

Speaker muted or microphone muted?

It shows a speaker, so strictly it means output is off.

The picture is a loudspeaker, the thing that plays sound, not a microphone, the thing that captures it. On a call, “my speaker is muted” means you can’t hear them, and “my mic is muted” means they can’t hear you; both get described with 🔇 because there is no muted-microphone emoji. If it matters, add the words: “can’t hear you 🔇” or “mic off 🔇, give me a second.”

The design copies a decades-old interface convention. Volume controls show a speaker with one, two or three sound waves for low, medium and high, and a speaker with an X or a slash for mute. Unicode encoded the whole set together, and this one was originally named “speaker with cancellation stroke,” which is why some platforms draw the X beside the speaker and others strike through it. Either way it reads as mute.