What ☃️ means
☃️ is the snowman emoji, filed under Travel & Places in the sky & weather subgroup of the Unicode emoji index.
It was added in Emoji 0.7 (2014) and the underlying characters entered Unicode in version 3.2 (2002). The characters therefore predate their emoji presentation by 12 years.
How it is encoded
☃️ is a sequence of 2 code points (U+2603 U+FE0F), joined so that they render as one glyph. Software that counts characters will report 2, not 1 — the usual source of broken emoji handling.
It is RGI (recommended for general interchange), so every major platform ships artwork for it.
Don't confuse it with
1Worth knowing
- The characters behind ☃️ existed in Unicode 12 years before anyone was allowed to draw them in colour: Unicode 3.2 in 2002, emoji presentation in 2014.
- ☃️ is not one character. It is 2 of them glued together, which is why deleting it sometimes takes two presses of backspace and why it breaks character counters.
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 ☃️
:snowman: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.