Squinting Face With Tongue

A big, goofy tease that cues laughter. The squeezed-shut eyes push a plain tongue-out into exaggerated territory — more clowning than flirting, closer to a cartoon 'gotcha' or a cheeky boast than real annoyance.

What does it mean when someone sends 😝?

Usually a tease — but check who the joke is on. A 2021 paper on Spanish WhatsApp chats summarizes a 2019 German group-chat study in which 😝 helped mark laughing with someone versus laughing at them.

Fired right back after your sincere message, it can land as mockery instead of playfulness. If the joke is about you, your relationship with the sender decides whether it's friendly ribbing or a jab.

Why does 😝 look like a taunt?

Early Japanese phone emoji tagged it with akkanbe. Akkanbe is a childish gesture of contempt or refusal: you pull down a lower eyelid to show the red inside, often sticking out your tongue too. A Japanese dictionary's earliest cited use of the word is a 1767 comic-verse collection — that dates the word in print, not the gesture.

A 2008 Unicode proposal lists this face as an extra-effect version of the plain tongue face, though it mapped the same KDDI and DoCoMo pictures to both. A 2009 mapping labels the KDDI picture 'teasing (akkanbee)'. So akkanbe is a carrier label that colours the face, not a proven origin.