Orca

It means the animal itself: an orca, or killer whale. Someone sending 🫍 is usually talking about the sea. They saw one on a whale-watching trip, they are at an aquarium, they are sharing a documentary or a news story about orcas, or they just adore the species and want its colours in their message.

The tone is warm and literal. It has no sarcastic, rude or slang reading, no hidden meaning in dating or gaming talk, and no political charge beyond what the conversation brings. Among orca fans it works like a badge: the black-and-white hearts combo 🫍🖤🤍 copies the animal's colouring. Before it existed, people reached for 🐋 or 🐬 and added the word "orca", and many still do.

What is an orca, really?

The largest member of the dolphin family, and the ocean's top predator. Despite the name, an orca is not a whale in the strict sense. It is a dolphin grown huge, black on top with a white belly, a white patch behind each eye and a tall dorsal fin that stands straight up on adult males. Orcas live in every ocean, from the Arctic to the Antarctic.

They live in tight family groups called pods, usually led by an older female, and each pod has its own set of calls, which researchers describe as dialects. Different populations specialise: some hunt only fish, others seals, and some famously beach themselves on purpose to snatch sea lions. Their intelligence and family bonds are a large part of why people find them so moving. In 2018 an orca off the Pacific Northwest, known as Tahlequah, carried her dead calf for more than two weeks, and the story travelled round the world.

Popular culture made orcas famous twice over. The 1993 film Free Willy, about a boy who frees a captive orca, turned the species into a symbol of freedom. The 2013 documentary Blackfish, about orcas kept in marine parks, turned public opinion against keeping them in tanks, and several countries and parks have since ended orca shows or breeding. Among the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, the orca is an ancient figure in carving, painting and stories, often seen as a guardian of the sea.

Since 2020, orcas off Spain and Portugal have repeatedly rammed and damaged small sailing boats. In 2023 the internet turned this into "orca uprising" jokes, cheering the orcas as rebels against yachts. That mood occasionally rides along with 🫍 when someone posts it under a story about a boat.

Why does my orca emoji show as a box?

Your phone or app has not received the new emoji yet. The orca arrived with the 2025 batch of emoji, and support across phones, computers and apps is still uneven as of 2026. A device without it shows an empty box, a question mark or nothing, while an updated device shows its own orca drawing.

Updating the system is the fix; apps that bundle their own emoji artwork, such as WhatsApp on some phones, update separately. If the person you are writing to has an older device, they will see a box however carefully you choose it, so adding the word "orca" costs nothing.