Pie

Usually exactly what it shows: dessert pie, baking, or wanting a slice. Someone posts 🥧 next to a photo of what came out of the oven, asks "pie later?", or replies to a dinner plan with it. It stands for the whole family of sweet pies: apple pie, cherry pie, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, lemon meringue. Around November it fills American feeds, because pumpkin pie is the classic end of a Thanksgiving dinner, and it turns up again at Christmas and at any bake sale.

The emoji is filed among sweets, and every platform draws a dessert: a round pastry case with a golden, often latticed top and a fruit-coloured filling showing through. That matters if you are British or Australian, where "pie" first brings to mind a hot meat pie or a pork pie. There is no savoury pie emoji, so 🥧 gets borrowed for those too, but the picture itself is a dessert.

It also carries the English idioms built on pie. "Easy as pie" means simple; "pie in the sky" is an unrealistic promise; "a piece of the pie" is a share of money or success; eating "humble pie" is admitting you were wrong. "Cutie pie" and "sweetie pie" are pet names, so 🥧 with a heart can be affection rather than hunger.

Why do people send 🥧 on 14 March?

Because in English, pie and the Greek letter π sound identical. π, pi, is the number 3.14159…, and 14 March written the American way is 3/14, so maths fans celebrate it as Pi Day, often by baking and eating pie. Since no emoji exists for π, 🥧 does the job: "happy 🥧 day", "3.14 🥧", a teacher's classroom post or a bakery's one-day discount. The pun is lost in most other languages, which is why non-English readers may see a sudden wave of pie on an otherwise ordinary day.

The rest of the year, read it as food first. Slapstick fans may use it for a pie in the face, and in money talk 🥧 can stand for the pie that gets divided (a pie chart, a slice of the profits), but those readings only appear when the words around it set them up.