Pig Face

Greedy, messy, pigged-out — English pig slang in one face. To "pig out" is to eat far too much and a "pigsty" is a filthy room, so the piggy face slides straight into the joke: post it after your third slice and everyone gets it. Point the same snout at someone else's plate or waistline and it turns into a dig about appetite or weight.

Around Lunar New Year, which opens the Chinese lunar year in late January or February, 🐷 marks the Pig, the twelfth and last animal of the Chinese zodiac — the twelve-year cycle that names each year after an animal — most recently 2019, next in 2031, where it is a lucky sign of plenty. That warm reading is old: Neolithic (late Stone Age) burials in north China held pig-head offerings, early dynastic tombs held miniature pigsties as signs of wealth, and a 2018 Korean Year-of-the-Pig exhibition tied the animal to fertility and abundance. Europe leaned the other way: a Dutch moral painting from about 1663–65 put a pig in a scene of drunkenness and theft.

The emoji began as Pig icons in Japanese mobile-phone carriers' sets. By 2009, Unicode proposal materials listed them so that different phones could exchange the same symbol. Unicode also has a whole-animal pig, 🐖, the same face-and-body split the dog, cat and mouse get.

What does it mean when someone sends you 🐷?

Check the timing and who it targets. Sent right after tacos or midnight snacks, it means you both pigged out — teasing, especially with 😂. Sent out of nowhere about your body, with no meal or joke around it, treat it as a real jab. Friends also build private codes: a 2018 emoji study recorded one person using 🐷 for a pub called The Three Piggies.

Language matters too. In Chinese, 小猪, "little pig", can be said fondly to a child or partner, depending on who says it, so weigh who sent it. At the hostile end, a 2023 analysis of Russian-language social media found pig emoji, 🐷 among them, used to dehumanize Ukrainians in posts from February–April 2022.