What ⛷️ means
It means skiing, and almost always the downhill kind. The figure wears a helmet or hat and goggles, holds two poles and crouches over a pair of skis, the posture of someone racing or cruising down a prepared slope. That is alpine skiing: you ride a lift up a mountain and ski down. Cross-country skiing, where you glide across flat or rolling snow on thin skis, is the other big branch of the sport, and in Nordic countries it is what "skiing" means by default. This emoji is not that; it is the resort sport of pistes, lift passes and après-ski.
Because of that, the emoji carries the whole mountain-holiday package: fresh snow, cold air, a cabin, hot drinks afterwards. People use it when booking a trip, announcing the first snowfall of the season, posting lift selfies or wishing someone a good week on the slopes. During the Winter Olympics and World Cup season it stands for the racing events too: downhill, slalom and giant slalom. Unlike most people emoji, it has no skin-tone options and no gender variants, so the one small figure speaks for every skier.
What does it mean when someone sends ⛷️?
They are skiing, want to go skiing, or are excited about snow. Next to dates or a place name it is a plan or an invitation. Next to a photo it is a brag, usually a happy one. On its own in a reply it means "yes, let's" or "enjoy the slopes". Among friends who ski, a run of ⛷️⛷️⛷️ is pure anticipation.
There is no edgy second meaning to watch for. The only mild joke is sending it after a tumble, a sore leg or a cast, where the little racer becomes self-mockery. If someone who never skis sends it, read the words around it: it may simply stand for winter, mountains or a cold snap.
Light, cheerful and completely safe in any chat; equally at home in a family group, a work channel or a dating profile that lists hobbies.
What it means when someone sends it to you
4 readingsDon't confuse it with
2Combination ideas
2Worth knowing
- The skier entered Unicode in 2009 among weather, map and sports pictograms taken from Japanese digital-television standards, five years before it was counted as an emoji at all.
- Alpine skiing first appeared at the Winter Olympics in 1936; the modern emoji's crouched, poles-back pose is the same tuck racers use to cut wind on the downhill.
Questions people ask
3Why can't I change the skier emoji's skin tone?
Because Unicode never gave this character skin-tone support. It is one fixed figure. Oddly, the snowboarder 🏂 right next to it does take skin tones, a quirk of when and how each was standardised.
Why does the skier show up as a plain black-and-white symbol sometimes?
It is an older text symbol that was later promoted to emoji, so on some systems it falls back to a monochrome pictogram unless the colourful emoji form is requested. Picking it from the emoji keyboard normally gives the colour version.
Is there a cross-country skier emoji?
No. ⛷️ is the only skiing person in the emoji set, and its pose is downhill. For cross-country, people usually pair it with words or with a snowy landscape.
How to type ⛷️
:skier:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.⛷️Codes and encoding2 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.