What 🥴 means
Drunk first, smitten second, fried third. In texting, those uneven eyes and wavy mouth read as tipsy or wasted after bar talk, lovestruck once a crush comes up, and simply overwhelmed after a long day. No single definition wins; the surrounding words pick one.
Drinking was the plan from the start: the 2017 proposal that brought it into Unicode suggested “inebriated” as its reading. The romantic and exhausted uses grew out of how people actually send it.
Someone sent me the woozy face — what now?
Read the line before it, not the face. After a story about last night, it means still drunk. After gushing about a date, it means weak in the knees. Sent alone, treat it as a loose, dazed reaction and ask if the difference changes your reply.
Silly and confessional among friends; risky anywhere professional.
At work it can read as drunk or flirty — write “sick” or “tired” in words.
What it means when someone sends it to you
4 readingsDon't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- Unicode's formal name for it is Face With Uneven Eyes and Wavy Mouth — “woozy face” is the nickname that stuck.
Questions people ask
2Why did people joke about the woozy face in 2018?
Nobody was sure what it showed. A viral 2018 tweet asking about it drew joke readings, like checking your bank balance after a night out. That was launch confusion, not a lasting meaning.
Why does 🥴 look different on different phones?
Each platform draws its own version. A 2020 Emojipedia roundup found the Google, WhatsApp and Facebook designs looked drunk, Twitter's more lovestruck, and Apple's more ambiguous.
How to type 🥴
:woozy_face:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.🥴Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.