What ๐ means
A warm welcome or hug offer, palms facing out. Both hands spread open toward you, like arms opening for an embrace โ the hug emoji people reach for when they want to say "come here" without a face attached. Nobody is actually hugging in the picture, so add words if you mean a literal hug.
What does it mean when someone sends ๐?
Usually warmth, unless it answers a question. Alone after good news, it reads as a hug or "proud of you." As the entire reply to "where is it?" or "what happened?", the same spread hands read as "no idea."
It started as three different Japanese phone icons
Emoji appeared on Japanese mobile phones from 1999, and each network had its own icon set and codes. Unicode created shared characters so messages could cross between them.
A 2010 Unicode background table maps ๐ to three carrier icons: DoCoMo's paper hand (the open palm in rock-paper-scissors), KDDI's bye-bye wave, and SoftBank's casual good-morning hand. Three different meanings were folded into one character. That is the emoji's digital lineage, not the origin of the physical gesture.
Warm and welcoming by default, light enough to tip into a shrug without words.
A bare ๐ as a work reply can read as "not my problem"; add words.
Part of collections
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsWarm hug: come here, proud of you
Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
1
Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- ๐ is a single code point, so it survives copying through almost anything โ old databases, SMS gateways, printer drivers.
Questions people ask
1Can ๐ mean jazz hands?
It can. As of 2026, some people use the spread palms as jazz hands, the dance and musical-theatre move of spread fingers waved at the audience; sparkles around it push the reading toward a showy "ta-da".
More like this
11
Collections with ๐
8
How to type or find ๐
- Search it as
- hug emoji ยท open arms ยท jazz hands ยท open hands emoji ยท welcome emoji ยท hug
- Type it as
- :open_hands:
- Around since
- 2010 ยท Emoji 0.6
- Shows up on
- Every phone ยท iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux
:open_hands:Common shortcode in Slack, GitHub, Discord, Mattermost and other chat apps; a few apps use a different name.👐Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.