What 🫱 means
An open hand extended sideways, the right half of a handshake. The fingers point to the right and the palm faces the person on the other side, which is exactly the pose you make a moment before gripping someone's hand. On its own it reads as reaching, offering or steadying.
It arrived in 2021 as a pair with , the same hand facing left, and the pair solved a long-standing complaint. The handshake could be given a skin tone, but only one tone for both hands, so a handshake between two people of different complexions could not be drawn. The fix was to encode the two hands separately: a mixed-tone handshake is stored as a rightwards hand with one tone, an invisible joiner, and a leftwards hand with another tone. Your phone shows that as a single clasped handshake. 🫱 is the first half of that recipe, and it also works on its own.
What does it mean when someone sends 🫱?
They are reaching toward you: offering help, a hand, or pointing the way. Next to words like "I'm here" or "call me any time" it is a helping hand. Next to a link, a name or a time it is a soft "this one, over here". Sent back and forth with it stands in for a deal, a truce or a reunion. It carries no insult and no hidden meaning; the worst that happens is a reader who has never seen it and finds it a little odd.
Warm and neutral: friendly in casual chat, acceptable in work messages, never rude.
On an older phone it may show as a blank box or break a two-tone handshake into two separate hands.
Part of the collection
What it means when someone sends it to you
4 readingsA helping hand: I'll pull you through this, lean on me.
Don't confuse it with
5
Combination ideas
4Worth knowing
- The character's job is invisible when it works: every handshake between two different skin tones on your phone is secretly this hand, a joiner and .
- It belongs to the 2021 batch of hands that also brought heart hands and index pointing at the viewer.
Questions people ask
4Is 🫱 the same as the handshake emoji?
No. is a complete handshake. 🫱 is a single reaching hand, which the handshake borrows when it needs two different skin tones.
Why did my two-tone handshake turn into two separate hands?
The receiving device doesn't support the joined sequence, so it shows the parts: a right hand, then a left hand. The sender saw one handshake; you see its ingredients.
Why does it show as a box or a blank on my screen?
The device's fonts predate 2022, when this emoji reached most phones and computers. A software update usually fixes it; the sender meant a hand reaching out.
Does it mean right-wing or political "right"?
No. "Rightwards" only describes the direction the hand faces. It has no political reading.
More like this
10
Collections with 🫱
3
How to type or find 🫱
- Also called
- hand reaching right · right hand · half handshake
- Search it as
- offer hand · handshake hand · two tone handshake · reach out · hand to the right · helping hand
- Type it as
- :rightwards_hand:
- Around since
- 2021 · Emoji 14.0
- Shows up on
- Every phone · iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux
:rightwards_hand:Common shortcode in Slack, GitHub, Discord, Mattermost and other chat apps; a few apps use a different name.🫱Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.