Tangerine

It began as a Japanese mikan, a kind of mandarin.

An earlier version appeared on SoftBank, a Japanese mobile carrier, in 2000, and the 2009 Unicode proposal named it Tangerine with the notes “Mikan” (Japanese for mandarin) and “Orange”. Mandarins are typically small, slightly flattened citrus with a peel that comes off by hand. The best-known Japanese kind, unshū mikan, is sweet, usually seedless and sold abroad as satsuma. Tangerine is the English name for a deeper orange-red mandarin, taken from Tangier, the Moroccan port that once shipped them to Europe. A clementine is a cross of mandarin and sweet orange.

So the name is a botanical accident. In messages, 🍊 covers every orange citrus, from a glass of orange juice to a satsuma in a lunchbox.

What does 🍊 mean in a Chinese New Year greeting?

Luck, borrowed from the mandarins of Lunar New Year.

In Chinese communities, from Hong Kong and Taiwan to families abroad, mandarins are given, displayed and eaten over Lunar New Year. In Cantonese the fruit's name, 桔, sounds exactly like 吉, “lucky”, so beside 🧧 or 🧨 a 🍊 reads as a festive wish rather than a grocery note. In Japan mikan are the classic winter fruit, eaten at the kotatsu, a low table with a heater underneath and a blanket around it, so in a cold-month message 🍊 may simply evoke a cosy evening at home. And in some European and American families, an orange goes in the toe of the Christmas stocking.