What 🧎 means
The thread decides: apology, prayer, protest or joke. Right after a mistake it is full grovel mode — forgive me, I'm on the floor. Next to prayer words it reads as reverence. It means protest only when the chat is already about politics or sport. Sent alone in a flirty DM, assume mischief.
Why do some versions kneel on one knee and others on two?
The design drifted from a protest kneel to a generic pose. In 2017 designer Ji Lee drew attention to his one-knee emoji inspired by Colin Kaepernick, the American football player who knelt during the U.S. national anthem in 2016 to protest racial injustice. The 2018 Unicode proposal was broader: kneeling as a basic posture beside standing, for rest, worship or protest.
When it arrived in 2019, Google's artwork knelt on one knee while other major vendors drew both knees. By 2020, press coverage had documented a sexual-joke reading of the two-knee pose.
Dramatic and context-heavy: the same lowered pose can signal humility or tip into innuendo.
Don't send it alone in a flirty chat — the sex-joke reading tends to land first.
What it means when someone sends it to you
4 readingsEvery form of this symbol
36Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Worth knowing
- 🧎 is a single code point, so it survives copying through almost anything — old databases, SMS gateways, printer drivers.
Questions people ask
2Is the kneeling emoji a Kaepernick protest emoji?
Not by itself. Ji Lee's design echoed Kaepernick, but the standard emoji is a general kneeling pose; read protest only when the conversation is political.
Can I use 🧎 for a sincere apology?
Yes, with words. Alone, the two-knee drawing can read as a sex joke; add "I'm so sorry" so the kneel stays humble.
How to type 🧎
:kneeling_person:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.🧎Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.