Shovel

It shows a digging tool: a handle and a blade, usually standing in soil. Most designs draw a wooden or metal handle with a D-shaped or straight grip and a pointed or rounded blade, often with a little mound of earth, so it reads as a garden or construction tool rather than a kitchen scoop.

Strictly, a spade has a flat, straight-edged blade for cutting into turf and digging, while a shovel has a curved, scooped blade for lifting and throwing loose material. In everyday American English “shovel” covers both, and the emoji is used for both too: planting a tree, turning a vegetable bed, mixing cement, filling sandbags or clearing a driveway after a snowfall. The ceremonial first dig at a building site, the “groundbreaking”, is done with a shovel, so it also turns up when a new school, bridge or house is announced.

Before 🪏 arrived with Emoji 16.0, the only digging tool available was the pick ⛏️, which is why older posts about gardening or shovelling snow often use the pick, a hammer or a seedling 🌱 instead.

What does it mean when someone sends you 🪏?

Usually exactly what it shows: there is digging, gardening or shovelling to do. “Allotment day 🪏🌱”, “Snow’s here, out with the shovels 🪏❄️” or “Fence posts going in Saturday 🪏” are the common cases, and the words carry the meaning.

The jokes come straight from English idioms. Someone who keeps making an awkward situation worse is “digging themselves a hole”, and a reply of nothing but 🪏 means “stop digging”. “Dig up the dirt” on a person is gossip; “bury” a story or a feud is to drop it. A shovel beside a coffin ⚰️ or headstone 🪦 is gallows humour, “bury me now”, or a very blunt way of saying someone has finished themselves off. On its own, though, the shovel says nothing about death; if the message is about a real funeral, the sender will have said so.

The tool is also familiar to gamers: in Minecraft the shovel is the tool for dirt, sand, gravel and snow, so it appears in game chat about digging and building.