What 👷 means
Building, fixing, or something not finished yet. Taken literally, it puts the message on a job: "roof's done 👷", "flat-pack day 👷". It suits professional builders and weekend DIY alike; context tells you which.
Taken figuratively, it flags a work in progress: a website, a plan, a profile or even a person still under construction, sometimes paired with . The base character is officially gender-neutral, though how it looks still depends on the platform's artwork.
Why is there a green cross on the hard hat?
It is Japan's occupational-safety symbol, carried over from Japanese carrier emoji. The emoji began among Japanese mobile-carrier pictograms. In Japan a green cross on white has marked workplace safety since the first national Safety Week in 1919, and appears on safety flags at sites and factories; it is not the Red Cross. Google's carrier mapping noted the figure as male in 2008, and early designs often showed a man; dedicated woman and man sequences came in 2016. The cross stayed on some artwork until Google's 2016 redesign dropped it, so hats still differ between platforms and versions.
Casual and good-humoured; fits jobsite banter, renovation updates and work-in-progress jokes.
Part of collections
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsProbably literal: a job, a site, a shift.
Every form of this symbol
18Don't confuse it with
3


Combination ideas
4Worth knowing
- 👷 is a single code point, so it survives copying through almost anything — old databases, SMS gateways, printer drivers.
Questions people ask
2Is 👷 a man or a woman?
Neither, officially. The base emoji is gender-neutral, though early designs often showed a man. Pick the woman or man construction worker in the tuner when gender matters.
Why does show up as two symbols?
The receiver's software doesn't support the sequence. The woman and man forms are joined sequences, and unsupported systems may split them into 👷 plus a or sign.
Collections with 👷
11How to type or find 👷
- Search it as
- hard hat · builder · contractor · foreman · laborer · tradesperson · safety helmet · under construction
- Type it as
- :construction_worker:
- Around since
- 2010 · Emoji 0.6
- Shows up on
- Every phone · iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux
:construction_worker:Common shortcode in Slack, GitHub, Discord, Mattermost and other chat apps; a few apps use a different name.👷Codes and encoding4 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.



