What 🚫 means
It marks something as forbidden. On many signs the red slash crosses out a picture of the banned thing; in a message, you supply that thing yourself. Put a word or another emoji beside it — the ban can cover an activity, a request or an idea.
What if someone sends me 🚫?
Read it as a no to your suggestion. A friend may be joking; at work, a bare 🚫 can sound like a command. If you're sending it, add a word of explanation so it doesn't read as a door slammed shut.
Blunt and sign-like, unless the surrounding message softens it.
A lone 🚫 can read as a hard refusal.
Don't confuse it with
2Combination ideas
1Worth knowing
- In international workplace safety signs, the empty red ring with a diagonal bar is the general prohibition sign, and it needs a text panel saying what is banned — the same job your words do next to 🚫.
- Searching by official name trips people up: Unicode formally calls 🚫 NO ENTRY SIGN, while ⛔ is just NO ENTRY.
Questions people ask
1Why does 🚫 look different on other phones?
Every platform draws its own artwork for the same code point. The character you send is identical; Apple, Google, Samsung and WhatsApp each render it in their own style.
How to type 🚫
:no_entry_sign: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.