Sun Behind Cloud

A sky with both sunshine and cloud. It sits between a clear day and an overcast one; the drawing shows sun and cloud sharing the sky, not an exact fraction of cover. In US forecasts, "partly cloudy" and "partly sunny" name the same category, which is why the emoji answers to both. Outside weather talk it has no settled slang meaning, so read it from the rest of the message.

Its roots are in Japanese television rather than phones. ⛅ was encoded from the weather symbols of ARIB STD-B24, the Japanese standard for text and data shown on digital TV broadcasts, where it stands for partly cloudy. Japanese mobile emoji sets of the same era had matching weather icons, and when emoji were standardised it joined them.

Which sun-and-cloud emoji should I send?

⛅ for partly cloudy; the others for more specific skies. 🌤️ is mostly sunny, 🌥️ mostly cloudy and 🌦️ sun with showers; ⛅ is the oldest of the four. They also display differently: ⛅ defaults to emoji presentation, while 🌤, 🌥, 🌦, ☀ and ☁ default to text style and depend on an invisible emoji selector (VS16) to request the colour picture. Where that selector is missing, some apps and fonts show them as monochrome outlines; ⛅ usually avoids this in modern apps.