Onion

A whole bulb onion, the kind you chop for cooking. Most platforms draw a round onion in golden-brown papery skin with a little tuft of roots or a dry stem at the top; some add a cut half so you can see the rings. It is the common storage onion of kitchens worldwide, not a spring onion, shallot or leek, and the emoji carries no colour variant for red or white onions.

The onion has been cultivated for thousands of years and belongs to the same plant family as garlic, leeks and chives. Raw, it is sharp and pungent; cooked slowly, it turns soft and sweet, which is why so many cuisines start a dish by frying onions. Onion rings, onion soup, pickled onions and the onions on a hot dog or burger all fall under this one picture.

The tears are real chemistry. Cutting an onion breaks its cells and releases a gas that irritates the eyes, so they water to wash it away. Chilling the onion first or using a very sharp knife reduces the effect. That everyday experience is why the onion stands for crying in jokes and emoji.

What does it mean when someone sends 🧅?

Usually just onions: buy some, add some, or leave them out. In a shopping message, 🧅 is a request to pick up onions. Next to a dish or recipe, it names an ingredient, and the words around it say whether the person wants extra onion or none at all. Among cooks and food posters it sits happily beside 🧄 and 🫑 as the base of a meal.

The second reading is tears. English speakers who are moved by something and do not want to admit it say "who's cutting onions in here?" or "it's just the onions". A 🧅 after a touching video, a wedding photo or a goodbye message means "this got me", often paired with 😭 or 🥲. It is a warm, self-aware way to show emotion without sounding dramatic.

A third, lighter reading is layers. Because an onion peels back layer after layer, people use it to describe someone or something more complicated than it first appears, a joke made famous by the ogre Shrek insisting that ogres are like onions. This reading needs the surrounding words to work; on its own, 🧅 is still a vegetable.