Woman gesturing NO

A firm no — not proof they’re angry.

Aimed at your plan, it’s a clean veto. Aimed at your behaviour or outfit, it turns scoldy and theatrical. In a 2021 university thesis, 49 of 50 German speakers read 🙅 as disapproval or refusal; one read it as “cool.” A 2007 study of a similar crossed-arms pictogram found American readers leaned toward anger, Japanese readers toward “no good.” Let the surrounding words tell you how personal it is.

Why is the no made with an X?

It borrows Japan’s cross mark for “wrong” or “no good.”

In Japan, batsu (a cross) marks an answer wrong or bad, and maru (a circle) marks it right. People act this out with their arms: crossed for batsu, curved overhead for maru. Unicode’s 2009 emoji proposal labelled this one “Face with No Good Gesture,” annotated “No good.”

Why does 🙅 often look like a woman?

Older artwork drew the plain version as a woman.

Separate man and woman versions arrived in 2016, but many platforms had already drawn the unmarked emoji as a woman, and some reused that picture for the woman form for years. An old screenshot can look like the woman variant even when someone sent the plain one. Today there are 18 versions — three gender forms, each in the default look plus five skin tones, all with one meaning.